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“Ellie will be five next month,” my daughter said, as if I needed a reminder.
“The nightmares have started. You know what you must do.”
Of course I knew. I would give her a doll, as my own great-grandmother had solemnly presented me with my Martha, on my fifth birthday, nearly eighty years ago. I have always wondered where the dolls come from. They are older than I dare imagine and have the faces of matriarchs, wise and knowing. They are our confidantes but keep their own secrets close. One cold November morning at Undercliff, when I was a child, I opened the pages of our family photograph album. The earliest showed a stiff formally-posed group, dated 1855.
“Look,” I said to my mother, pointing to an old woman with narrow suspicious eyes and a pock-marked face.
“It’s Martha, my doll.” Mother said nothing and the album was hidden.
But I knew they were identical. I learned later that the figure in the photograph was born in 1781 and died in 1861. Her name was Martha too. Naively, I imagined I had chosen the name for my doll. In adulthood, I’ve seen those coarse eighteenth-century female faces, riddled with doubt and smallpox, in the engravings of Hogarth and Rowlandson. My Martha stares back at me, scarred and all-seeing, from two centuries ago. My daughter's doll, Marjory, is older still. Her face has the religious fervour and certainty of pious nuns and martyrs I have seen only in illuminated medieval manuscripts. And I knew that when we came to Undercliff, a doll would be waiting for Ellie. It was her rite of passage and signaled her ownership of one of the three bedrooms. And her nightmares would be pushed back to the edge of dream and become bearable. We carry our dolls wherever we go, but especially to Undercliff. In the darkness, they are our morphine, our laudanum, but more potent and more soporific than any chemical narcotic.