Porcelain Princess (5 page)

‘
Found it, found it!’ Jacob yelled in triumph as he held up a
blunted stub of a pencil along with his scrap of paper.

He flattened out
the crumpled paper. He pressed the pencil against the paper as he
began to write.

‘
Jacob!’ his wife shrieked as she tugged the paper out from
beneath his hand. ‘Has it already slipped your memory how your
complaint to the council wasn’t taken seriously because you’d
written it on a worthless bit of paper?’

With a flourish,
she produced a sheet of the finest paper from a drawer that Jacob
hadn’t got around to searching.

‘
Yes,
yes,’ he agreed, taking the paper from her with a grateful smile.
‘The Meaning of Life needs to be presented on the finest paper to
be taken with the seriousness it deserves!’

‘
The
Meaning of Life?’ his wife declared in awe and admiration as Jacob
prepared to write his amazing insight down on the perfectly
linen-white paper.

She snatched the
stubby pencil from his hand.

‘
Jacob! You can’t write down The Meaning of Life with
that
!’

She turned
towards a cupboard, producing a wonderfully elegant quill and ink
reservoir.

‘
Can’t you hold
anything
in that empty head of yours?
Have you already forgotten how I bought you
this
for your
birthday?’

‘
Yes,
yes, I remember now,’ Jacob replied, gleefully accepting the
elegant quill handed to him by his wife. ‘You said that it would
make me look like a man of letters, an educated, knowledgeable
man!’

He spread the
perfectly blank piece of paper out before him. He dipped the
beautifully graceful quill in the ink. He brought it to hover
expectantly over the pristine paper.

His wife beamed
with pride.

‘
Well?’ she said after a moment in which nothing further had
happened.

‘
I’m
thinking, I’m thinking…’

‘
The
Meaning of Life, Jacob; you said you were going to write down The
Meaning of Life.’

‘
Yes,
yes, I
did
, didn’t I?’

And so, feeling
a fool, mumbling to himself over and over ‘The Meaning of Life
is…’, Jacob prepared to write down the first thing that cane into
his head.

But the
beautifully graceful quill produced no beautifully graceful
letters.

And the
perfectly linen-white sheet remained perfectly
linen-white.

Out in the
fields, however, Jacob’s ground was left only half tilled. His
horse, with nothing better to do, was pondering The Meaning of
Life.

Suddenly, the
answer that had eluded so many important and learned men struck
him.

‘
Wow,
I’ll have to make sure I
never
forget
that
!’ the
horse resolutely told himself, slowly turning everything over in
his mind. For he had neither pen nor paper, or even fingers to
write it down with.

And he smiled
with contentment.

*

Despite the
constant rocking of the wagon on the badly rutted road, Carey was
busily blending and mixing the paints she would need to replace the
posters that had either been damaged or lost to the wind in the
last town. The white of eggs, oil, crushed flowers, even seeds and
beetles; they all went into her pots.

Open before her,
but placed at a distance where it was safe from any splashes, was
the Illuminator’s
The
Porcelain Child
. Carey wanted
to match his colours, yet, as always, she was finding this
impossible, no matter which combination of ingredients she
experimented with.

He could
perfectly capture the myriad of greens you could find in a blade of
glass, the yellows of every minute scale on a butterfly’s wings,
the reds of a fiery sunset, the blues of an inquisitive baby’s
iris.

How did he
achieve such detail?

How long did it
take him to paint just one of his pictures?

If anyone ever
doubted that the Illuminator’s tales were based on reality rather
than mere fairy tales, they soon changed their minds on seeing his
pictures. No one, they would agree, would waste time creating such
beautifully accurate illustrations for anything as fleetingly
unimportant as a simple fairy story.

If anything,
Carey took this belief even further; everything in his pictures
served a purpose, everything was done for a reason. And if
something within those illustrations seemed unusual or puzzled you,
then a careful study of the details, in combination with your own
logic and reason, would provide you with an answer.

The Porcelain
Child
had its own particular puzzle, one that caused Durndrin
no end of frustration whenever he played the father; for the father
was never really portrayed in the illustrations. He only ever
appeared as a shadow, an unclear reflection in an eye or a glazed
jug, or seen from behind or so low down that we only ever saw his
legs and boots.

‘
How
can I adequately play a fully
rounded
character, when we
know so little of him?’ Durndrin would complain after every show,
lamenting his own ‘unprofessional, unsatisfactory
performance.’

‘
But
as you’ve said yourself Durndrin, you’ve put more “meat on his
bones” than any other theatre could come up with,’ one of the
others would say in an attempt to reassure him, using one of his
own favourite phrases.

As she stared at
The Porcelain Child
’s illustrations, Carey could understand
Durndrin’s frustration.

The man’s wife
was, as you’d expect from the Illuminator, portrayed with a skill
that made her leap from the page. You instantly knew the colour and
style of her hair, the shape of her face, her nose, the kindness of
her eyes. You knew the way she dressed, the graceful way she went
about her tasks, the patience and intimacy she displayed when
working on the most intricate parts of her creation. Her carefully
observed expressions alone allowed you to instinctively sense her
complete nature, her probable reaction to almost any
event.

Of her husband,
however, we have only snippets of information that we can gather
from the story itself, and then only in the ways he reacts to his
wife.

‘
Her
husband would tell her to rest, to let him finish her
work.’

He loved his
wife. He was caring, thoughtful. A potter of some sort in his own
way too.

‘“
But
you, you my dearest, must promise me that you will grant our
daughter
life
.”’

He would do
anything to please his wife. He would make a promise, and he would
endeavour to fulfil that promise. And, like his wife, he wanted a
child, a daughter, to love and cherish.

‘
And
she smiled, and whispered, “I love you”; for they both believed
that the Illuminator could grant their daughter the gift of
life.’

He’s a man
worthy of even this remarkable woman’s love. And he believes in
what some people would only dismiss as impossible
miracles.

In this way,
Carey had realised long ago, you’re forming an idea of him around
her; and you could achieve something similar by painstakingly
studying the illustrations. The wife’s deftly portrayed expressions
could also be used as clues to her husband’s own
character.

The way she
literally looks up to him is obviously a sign that he’s taller than
her. But look at the sparkle in her eyes, the grateful, upward turn
of her mouth; he’s a man to be admired, a man she’s overjoyed to
share her life with despite their sadness that they have been
unable to have a child.

She reaches out
a hand to tenderly caress his cheek, her face brimming with warmth,
actions that anyone can read as her care for him. See, though, how
her mouth is firmly set, her stare direct and firm as if trying to
instil courage in him; he loves her so much that, despite his
refusal to tilt his head into her welcoming hand, despite the way
he must be fighting the urge to desperately clasp his own hand over
hers, he’s suffering beyond all measure. And yet he tries to hide
that pain, fearing that she is already suffering too much herself
to have to share his own growing agony.

There is another
clue, of course, to his character. And that lies in the expression
of the child, in reality lifeless and yet, in the Illuminator’s
hands, full of life.

Of course, the
Illuminator is only portraying what he believes is already there;
the
beginnings
of life. And that means that her father
will
succeed. He
will
bring life to his
daughter.

The way she had
to conjure up an idea of this man from what she knew of his wife
was a perfect reverse of Carey’s reality for, never having known
her mother, she could only form a picture of what her mother had
been like through her father’s own recollections.

She had been
beautiful. She was kind. She was full of laughter. She would have
loved to see how intelligent and beautiful Carey had
become.

‘
There’s
so
much of her in you, Carey,’ he would sigh,
smiling sadly as he tenderly stroked her face.

He would smile
in a similarly sad way as he carefully ran his delicate fingers
over the face of a puppet that Carey’s mother had made.

‘
It
helps me remember her as she patiently created this face,’ he had
explained when Carey had asked him why certain puppets seemed to
make him both sad and happy at the same time. ‘I can feel the way
she felt as she moulded the papier-mâché into a cheek, or into the
hollow of an eye. Or, with this puppet, I can sense the care she
took as she tenderly carved the wood into this hooked nose, this
protruding chin.’

Handing the
puppets to Carey, he had said, ‘
Feel
the faces, Carey;
ignore the characters she’s creating, but simply clear your find so
that you can feel
her
, feel her
intent
. Sense the
senses that
she’s
using, the emotions
she’s
going
through.’

Carey had
delicately traced the contours of the faces, closing her eyes,
hoping that it would somehow magically allow her to have a glimpse
of her mother.

She felt the
flow of the fingers that had smoothed the papier-mâché into a
rounded cheek. She sensed the pressure of a thumb as it was used to
form the hard differentiation between the neck and cheek. She was
aware of the humour required to pinch the material into an upturned
nose.

Her mother was
at the table, straining her eyes in the poor light to make sure the
face would be right. She wants it to be prefect, as she wants all
her little dears to be prefect. They have to entertain, to enthral,
after all. His expression must be mischievous, yes, but that
doesn’t mean I can’t give him a knowing grin that, in other
circumstances, becomes a warm smile.

She was bringing
these wonderful characters to life for others to enjoy, to laugh at
and to cheer them on whenever the character being played was
clambering out of trouble.

What better life
could there be than that?

Her mother was
happy, content.

Carey had put
the puppet down with a sad yet happy smile.

It was the
Fading that had finally taken Carey’s mother, her father had told
her. When she was young, too young to remember anything about her.
It was too long ago for even the puppets to remember anything about
her too, as their memories were short lived and always
incomplete.

‘
The
Fading isn’t anything to be feared,’ her father tried to reassure
her as he himself succumbed to it later in her life. ‘It gives us
all time to say our goodbyes. There’s nothing worse than to lose
someone and suddenly realise we’d left so many things
unsaid.’

Carey had held
her father’s hand for as long as she could before he finally began
to slip away into nothingness.

‘
I
love you dad,’ she’d said, returning the last lingering glimpses of
his sad smile.

*

‘
Carey!’

Grudo’s gruff
shout carried back from where he was seated on the caravan’s diving
seat.

‘
Someone on the road,’ he added. ‘Coming towards
us.’

‘
Shussh you lot!’ Carey hissed back towards the caravan’s rear
room, where the others were laughing and joking as they recalled
all the things that had gone wrong in previous shows.

The rear room
suddenly went quiet. As Carey stoppered her pots of paint and oils,
she could already hear the slightly out of tune singing of a man
unhurriedly drawing closer.

*

The
Troubadour’s Song

The whitest
skin, the fairest face

An angel’s
banquet you could grace

Oh lady lady
would you marry me

Even though a
pauper I am to thee