I asked Father John about the old Jesus and he said it hadn’t been wood but terracotta, shattered when the cross came down in a storm ten or more years ago and replaced a couple of years later by this one. The cross was the original one, restored.
Inside the doorway near the always-open chapel was a bulletin board to which were pinned an advertisement for Weight Watchers, handwritten notices from people looking for jobs and flats, and one that said CUT AND BLOW DRY. RING TONY.
7 Sarah Varley
Sometimes in the underground I close my eyes and the sound of the wheels on the rails and the surging and swaying of the carriage become the rolling passage of the years in the darkness of my mind: 1985 to 1993 rush towards me and away: my years with Giles.
He was a good-looking man, tall and blond, and his honest open face charmed everyone. He had strong hands, golden hairs on the backs of them in the lamplight. I used to feel safe in those hands but not quite safe enough to think of starting a family although Giles wanted to. He was good at starting things but so far hadn’t gone the distance with anything and I was the only steady provider in our marriage. When he got into doll’s houses I thought perhaps he’d found himself. He hadn’t done anything like that before but he was good with his hands, good with tools; he already had a pretty well-equipped workshop but there were enough saws, gouges, drills and whatnot that he lacked to give him some happy hours at the ironmonger’s.
He bought a book on the subject and built a beautiful nine-room Georgian house on a scale of one inch to one foot. He painted it but didn’t furnish it. It took him four months which wasn’t bad considering the work involved — the windows and doors alone took more hours than I’d have expected. We ate a lot of pistachios back then because he used the shells as cups for glue.
He put an ad with a photograph in Homes and Antiques and very quickly got a commission from a London collector to do a six-room Victorian house on the same scale as the Georgian one. ‘The full-size world’s too much for me,’ he said, ‘but at one inch to one foot I might do quite well.’ In six months he completed the Victorian house, painted and with electric lights but unfurnished, to the client’s satisfaction, got a cheque for seventeen hundred pounds, and we drank champagne for the first time since loft extensions.
Commissions for a Queen Anne and a Regency followed the Victorian house, and the workshop became a place of ongoing action and contentment for Giles. When he came upstairs for meals he was often whistling, and he carried himself like a man who was putting meat on the table.
His next client was a woman in Bristol who rang him up and asked him if he could make her a copy of a seventeenth-century doll’s house in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She was American and her name was Peggy Sue Wilson.
She sent Giles a museum booklet with detailed descriptions, illustrations, and measurements; it was obvious to me that this was a project that might take years. Giles of course was delighted at the prospect of conferences in Bristol and at least one trip to Amsterdam. This one was altogether a more serious undertaking than his last commission: the doll’s house of Petronella Dunois, the daughter of a high official in The Hague, was a square oak cabinet veneered with walnut that stood two metres high on its barley-twist legs and displayed frontally the peat loft, the linen room, the nursery, the lying-in room, the salon or ‘best room’, the cellar, the kitchen, and the dining room. Every room was full of family and/or servants, furniture and every kind of artefact, all of which Giles intended to copy along with the complete decoration of the rooms. Even the veneering was nothing simple: it was walnut marquetry in a geometrical pattern of rosettes and stars. To me this looked like a job for an army of artists and craftsmen but Giles said he could do it. ‘Don’t forget,’ he said with a crooked smile, ‘this isn’t the big world, it’s the little one.’
‘I hope you’re getting paid in full-size money,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry, I have a good feeling about this one but I can’t do an estimate until we go to Amsterdam and I see what the job entails.’
So Giles and Peggy Sue went to Amsterdam. He took photographs, made sketches and notes, and came home rather pleased with himself. ‘I’ll get fifteen thousand for the house with nothing in it,’ he said. ‘That’s not bad, is it? I’ll do a separate estimate for the furnishings, the decorations, and the figures when I’ve finished the house.’
‘What about your expenses so far — air fare, hotel, and the rest of it?’ When he was feeling expansive he tended to brush details aside.
‘I’ll put the travel expenses on the invoice for the starting payment of five thousand pounds. I get five thousand more at the halfway point and the balance when the house is finished.’ I could hear the pride in his voice; I was touched by it and happy for him but the size and complexity of the project made me anxious.
‘You get the first five thousand before you start the work,’ I said, ‘right?’ It was difficult for me to believe that someone called Peggy Sue was going to pay Giles any part of fifteen thousand pounds.
‘Yes, I’m actually going to get five thousand pounds before I do anything. I am now on a par with roofers and builders and other guys who drive around in white vans with ladders on top.’
‘When are you invoicing her?’
‘As soon as I get proper business stationery.’ So that was the first part of the job and it took two weeks and a couple of hundred pounds which resulted in reams of costly laid A4 headed The Small World of Giles Varley. A little twee, I thought. Maybe even unlucky.
The invoice did at length go out, the cheque came in; Giles went to Moss & Co in Hammersmith for the oak and walnut and got started. From then on he spent most of his time in his workshop. He intended to do the base with the barley-twist legs first; for this he needed complete accuracy in his calculations for the lathe work and he hadn’t much time for conversation.
I went down there every now and then to see how it was going; I liked the smells of paint and glue remaining from the last doll’s house and the smell of new wood from this one; I liked the work-bench with its vice and its jumble of tools and wood scraps and the green-shaded light bulb that made an island of warmth where he worked. Until now the basement had been a cosy place for me to visit but the atmosphere had changed and I could feel that this project was weighing heavily on Giles. ‘There’s a lot more to this one than there’s been to the others you’ve done,’ I said.
‘You think it’s too much for me?’
‘No, I don’t,’ I lied. ‘It’s just that you don’t seem to be having fun with it the way you did with the others.’
‘Work can’t always be fun — it’s only a doll’s house but we’re talking museum quality here.’ He had in his right hand a jointed folding rule, boxwood with brass hinges and pivot. It was marked in inches and centimetres; when the four parts of it were folded together it was nine inches long, and it opened out to a yard. The markings on it were clear and sharp; it was a device of exactitude, a reassuring thing to hold in the hand. He had been tapping his thigh with it as we talked.
It was obvious that he didn’t want me watching him and I began to understand that he knew very well that he’d taken on too much; whether he’d done it to challenge himself or defeat himself I didn’t know, but he wasn’t the Giles I was used to and a distance grew between us.