Appropriately enough — though the irony then escaped me completely I first saw Serena Cockayne at the World’s End, in that area at the lower end of the King’s Road now occupied by a cluster of high-rise apartment blocks but which only three years ago was still an enclave of second-rate antique shops, scruffy boutiques and nineteenth-century terrace housing overripe for redevelopment. Pausing on my way home from the office by a small curio shop announcing its closing-down sale, I peered through the sulphur-stained windows at the few remnants on display. Almost everything had gone, except for a clutch of ragged Victorian umbrellas collapsed in the corner like a decaying witch and an ancient set of stuffed elephants’ feet. These dozen or so dusty monoliths had a special poignancy, all that remained of some solitary herd slaughtered for its ivory a century earlier. I visualized them displayed secretly around my sitting room, filling the air with their invisible but dignified presences.
Inside the shop a young woman attendant sat behind a marquetry desk, watching me with her head tilted to one side as if calculating in a patient way how serious a customer I might be. This unprofessional pose, and her total lack of response as I entered the shop, ought to have warned me off, but already I had been struck by the young woman’s unusual appearance.
What I first noticed, transforming the dingy interior of the shop, was the magnificence of her brocaded gown, far beyond the means of a sales girl at this dowdy end of the King’s Road. Against a lustrous blue field, a cerulean of almost Pacific deepness, the gold and silver patterning rose from the floor at her feet, so rich that I almost expected the gown to surge up and engulf her. By comparison, her demure head and shoulders, white bust discreetly revealed. by the low bodice, emerged with an extraordinary serenity from this resplendent sea, like those of a domestic Aphrodite seated calmly astride Poseidon. Although she was barely beyond her teens, her hair had been dressed in a deliberately unfashionable style, as if lovingly assembled by an elderly devotee of twenties’ film magazines. Within this blonde helmet her features had been rouged and powdered with the same lavish care, eyebrows plucked and hairline raised, without any sense of pastiche or mock nostalgia, perhaps by an eccentric mother still dreaming of Valentino.
Her small hands rested on her lap, apparently clasped together but in fact separated by a narrow interval, a stylized pose that suggested she was trying to hold to her some moment of time that might otherwise slip away. On her mouth hung a faint smile, at once pensive and reassuring, as if she had resigned herself in the most adult way to the vanishing world of this moribund curio shop.
‘I’m sorry to see you’re closing down,’ I remarked to her. ‘That set of elephants’ feet in the window… there’s something rather touching about them.’
She made no reply. Her hands remained clasped their millimetres apart, and her eyes stared in their trance-like way at the door I had closed behind me. She was sitting on a peculiarly designed chair, a three-legged contraption of varnished teak that was part stand and part artist’s easel.
Realizing that it was some sort of surgical device and that she was probably a cripple — hence the elaborate make-up and frozen posture I bent down to speak to her again.
Then I saw the brass plaque fastened to the apex of the teak tripod on which she sat.
Attached to the plaque was a dusty price ticket. ‘250’.
In retrospect, it is curious that it took me so long to realize that I was looking, not at a real young woman, but at an elaborate mannequin, a masterpiece of the doll-maker’s art produced by a remarkable virtuoso. This at last made sense of her Edwardian gown and antique wig, the twenties’ cosmetics and facial expression. None the less, the resemblance to a real woman was uncanny. The slightly bowed contours of the shoulders, the too-pearly and unblemished skin, the few strands of hair at the nape of the neck that had escaped the wig-maker’s attentions, the uncanny delicacy with which the nostrils, ears and lips had been modelled — almost by an act of sexual love together these represented a tour de force so breathtaking that it all but concealed the subtle wit of the whole enterprise. Already I was thinking of the impact this life-size replica of themselves would have on the wives of my friends when I first introduced them to it.
A curtain behind me was drawn back. The owner of the shop, an adroit young homosexual, came forward with a white cat in his arms, chin raised at the sound of my delighted laughter. Already I had taken out my chequebook and had scribbled my signature with a flourish befitting the occasion.
