legends · 5 min read ·
Scale 1:12
A miniature-maker is asked to repair a figure's empty hands, and the painted sea in her attic window rises.
**Pellow Miniatures — Autumn Catalogue**
*Handmade dolls' houses and rooms, scale 1:12. Each piece is made to order.*
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**The Harbour Room.** A single room, 22 × 18 cm. Painted panelling, a brass lamp, a fishing net on the wall. Includes two miniature chairs and a table laid for two.
*Made to order. Please allow 8 weeks.*
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**The Study at Eastwick.** Two-storey house, front opens. Study with a desk, a globe, and a window with a painted view of the sea. Figure of a man in a fisherman's jumper included, seated at the desk. Please specify whether the figure should be reading or looking up.
*Note: this piece is commissioned from the archive. Client requests the figure be kept facing the window at all times.*
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**The Attic Room.** Single attic with a sloped ceiling, a bed, and a small skylight. Figure of an adult woman, seated at the window, is included as standard. She cannot be moved from the window.
*Restorer's note (see below).*
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**Restorer's note — The Attic Room (Mark Pellow, 3 November)**
I made this room for a client in March. She ordered it through the catalogue and asked only that the skylight be painted with a real sky, not a flat blue. I did the work myself over six weeks. It's among the best miniature interiors I've ever built.
When the client collected it, she asked me to check the figure at the window. I had carved her from boxwood and dressed her in a grey wool dress, and she had a face I'd painted to look like someone sad but calm. The client looked at her for a long time.
"She's wrong," the client said.
"What's wrong?"
"Her hands. She's supposed to be holding something."
I had not given her anything to hold. The client said that was all right, because she knew what it was. Then she took the room away.
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**Restorer's note — The Attic Room (Mark Pellow, 9 November)**
The room was returned to the workshop on a Tuesday, with a note on the box. *Please repair the figure's hands. The hands are wrong. She keeps losing track of him.*
I opened the box with some care. The figure was still at the window, seated, facing the skylight. Her hands were still empty.
But on the bed, which I had made up with a patchwork quilt, there was a second figure lying on its side. It was a man, perhaps four inches high, carved from the same boxwood. He wore a fisherman's jumper, scaled down, and his boots were still wet. The face was painted with two dots for eyes and a straight line for a mouth. He had been placed carefully under the quilt, with his hands folded beneath his chin.
I hadn't made him. The client had supplied no man.
Then I noticed the window. The painted sea on the back wall had moved. The waves were a little higher. There was a second line of foam across the bottom of the painted sky, very faint, the shape of a tide that had come in overnight, and was now lapping at the edge of the attic floor.
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**Restorer's note (Mark Pellow, 12 November)**
I've been up in the attic room for two days. I can't leave it. The door of the workshop is locked from the inside, although I'm the only one in here.
The painted sea is now the real sea. I'm looking out through the skylight, and there are waves in it, grey and rolling, and the room has become a sea-facing attic at the top of a tall house on the cliff, with the water coming up under the eaves.
The woman at the window hasn't moved. Her hands are still empty. The man under the quilt has been turned to face the wall, and his small painted mouth is open, as if he's about to say something he's been trying to say for years.
I've been humming a hymn to keep myself steady. I didn't know I knew the tune. It's the one about the boats coming in at dusk.
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**Letter from client (Ms. Ida Vale, received 14 November, hand-delivered)**
*Dear Mr. Pellow,*
*Thank you for the attic room. I'm sorry you've been stuck in it. I should have explained.*
*The room is a copy of the one my husband and I lived in, the year before the flood. I ordered it so I could look at it properly, from above, without having to be inside. I wanted to see him again, asleep, under the quilt, the way he was on the night the water came.*
*He's not in the room. He's in the sea. You'll find him if you look beneath the window, at the place where the painted water meets the floorboards. He's been lying there quietly, with his hands folded, and he's always wanted someone to tell him the boats are in.*
*Please don't be frightened of the figure at the window. She's not the one keeping you. She's the one who lost track of him, and she's been holding out her hands for so long that she's forgotten what she was reaching for.*
*You can put the room back in the box now. Please leave the skylight open. The sea has to come in some way, and I'd like it to find him.*
*Yours, with thanks,*
*Ida Vale*
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**Pellow Miniatures — notice to clients (16 November)**
The Attic Room has been removed from the catalogue. The workshop is closed for maintenance.
Mark Pellow has been released from the workshop. He has asked us to note that the room is now complete, that the skylight is open, and that the figure at the window has been given something to hold.
*The figure is a man, four inches high, carved from boxwood. His hands are folded under his chin. He is asleep.*