Until then, Kemp’s idea of window dressing had been to cram as much merchandise as possible into the old store’s small dark window and send a boy in there with a feather duster every three months. There hadn’t been the space for mannequins. Instead the few that Donaldson’s possessed were dotted inside the store. Now he was to come up with ideas to fill the expanse of plate glass and provide sketches? He couldn’t wield a pencil for any purpose beyond words and numbers.
At home that evening he’d shared his predicament with Louisa.
‘But you must have ideas, Col. You’re around the goods all day. Just put them together to make a scene. Tell a story.’
‘But half our dummies are missing arms. They look as if they’ve just come back from fighting the Boers.’
‘What about a battle scene?’ she asked mischievously.
‘That may be in poor taste.’
‘If there was some way of hiding the missing parts,’ Louisa said and looked down at the threadbare tablecloth. ‘Flossie cannot for the life of her draw hands, so her damsels are always holding mufflers, her dashing knights crossing their arms. Perhaps you could hide the missing parts? Prepare a forest scene. The trees could hide the shortcomings of the dummies.’
‘A forest? That sounds like a fair amount of work.’
‘Not if you’re smart,’ said Louisa and reached for her sketchbook.
The next morning he’d shown Louisa’s drawing to Begg, acting as if it were his own.
‘And how much will you need for incidentals?’
‘Perhaps one and sixpence?’ he’d offered. He planned to cut actual saplings from his own property and install them in the display.
‘A miser? My estimation of you grows by the minute, Mr Kemp.’
With time he and Louisa became expert at recognising stories from the newspaper or details from their own lives that could form the basis of a new display. A jail break. A night at the theatre. Bringing home the latest addition to the family—all the while trying to start their own.
Though he no longer had to show Begg his idea before producing a display, he still had Louisa prepare a sketch on a piece of foolscap, which he then replicated in the windows of Donaldson’s.
It was Louisa who suggested he carve his own mannequins, sick of his continual complaints about the state of the store’s dummies and the cost of ordering new ones from overseas. Louisa who urged him on. Louisa who bandaged his damaged fingers.
He looked across the street at his latest window and saw too much of Louisa in it. The ghost of her face in the four mannequins. The echo of her voice, the shade of her pencil in the layout. The numerals ‘1902’ cut from large shards of broken looking-glass (quite how ladies broke mirrors in the confines of a dressing room was still a mystery to him). The black ropes against the black background, invisible to the casual onlooker, which would hoist the ‘2’ up into the false ceiling and replace it with a ‘3’. His best mannequins forming happy couples either side of the sparkling numbers, dressed in their finest theatre clothes, who would turn to each other as the ‘3’ descended and almost clink their champagne flutes, thanks to individual turntables concealed in the false floor. All the movement rigged up to the same gas engine that powered the pneumatic Lamson tubes that sent money and receipts around the store.
‘I can see the ropes,’ Josephine said. He had almost forgotten she was beside him. ‘I can picture exactly what will happen, but I want to see it anyway.’
‘And you can,’ he said, ‘tomorrow.’
It was only a short block back to Hercus & Barling. Looking over Josephine’s head he could see a small crowd of eight or ten people outside its window. There was no such crowd for Donaldson’s.
‘Why don’t you go look at The Carpenter’s window?’ he suggested.
‘The curtain’s still down,’ she replied.
Ten people are willing to stare at his blank curtain, he thought, rather than my display. He could feel his skin flush once more.
From the first, the two department stores had not just affected the sole traders—the widow dressmaker, the dealer in golden rings and small trinkets—but had also fed upon each other, undercutting prices, paying exorbitant amounts for shipping to ensure stock was the first to arrive, offering more generous credit terms. Each store had a man dressed as Santa Claus in the week before Christmas and the town delighted in judging whose St Nick was fatter, whose white beard looked the more authentic. But the battle was most evident, and most crucial, in the window. It was not a competition between two stores but between Colton Kemp and The Carpenter, ever since the day the silent sod strolled into town. Kemp had never heard him talk, though Big Jim Raymond swore The Carpenter congratulated him upon his re-election in September. What sort of affectation was it not to speak when spoken to? To always wear the same loud suit with its large houndstooth check and to nod and wave and point before trotting up Pukehine Hill at the end of the day?
But damn the man, his mannequins were a wonder. The story went that The Carpenter walked down from his shack on the hill carrying a wooden mannequin, placed it in front of the entrance to Hercus & Barling two days before their grand opening, and Hercus offered him a job on the spot. Kemp’s curiosity got the better of him at the opening and he saw the window display first-hand: dozens of electric lights powered by the store’s own generator (Donaldson’s, like the town itself, was still to make the leap to electricity), thirteen headless mannequins of the sort imported from Europe (though he suspected they were, like Emile Hercus, second-hand from Sydney) and, at the centre, The Carpenter’s serene lady, dressed in a red moirette dress with a blue shawl draped over her left shoulder and arm, the soft hand protruding, palm up. The skin was smooth and bright as porcelain, but looked as if it would give to the touch. What manner of wood had he used? What tools to exact such detail? What paints, tints or stains to flush her with life? What beast had he shorn to create her mane of brown hair, curling as it passed the hint of her ears and tumbled down her shoulders?
The Carpenter’s first mannequin was a revelation for Kemp and a sensation for the town. Over the following months The Carpenter produced more figures. The appearance of each was an event that surpassed the excitement of a new window at Donaldson’s, no matter how intricate Kemp’s mechanics, how timely the scene or artistically it was laid out. The Marumaru Mail began speculating about the gender, age, hair and eye colour of The Carpenter’s next model weeks before it appeared. No one seemed to care about the masses of blank space in his window displays, the utter stasis of his arrangements, the lack of theme or connection to the town in which the store sat: The Carpenter’s window was another world, one on the cusp of coming to life.
Little by little this world began to spill into Marumaru. The ladies of the town, who had conformed to the modest colonial fashion for dark skirts and white blouses, began to step out in the reds and blues and greens of The Carpenter’s window. The men stuck with subdued tones for their suits and waistcoats but stuffed silk handkerchiefs of turquoise or magenta into their breast pockets and emerald felt bowlers on their heads. Visitors from the north and from the south often remarked upon the deluge of colour in the town, the women’s resemblance to parakeets, the men’s to mallard drakes. Perhaps most tellingly, when a visiting photographer set up his equipment at Hercus & Barling the townsfolk chose to be immortalised performing the poses of The Carpenter’s models.
Kemp had already thrown himself into the making of his own mannequins before The Carpenter’s arrival but he could not breathe life into them in the same way. They remained wooden forms, collections of limbs and blank spaces for covering with cloth and millinery.
An open carriage drawn by two old Clydesdales passed Kemp and Josephine. It was heading toward the wharf, or perhaps out of town. For a moment he considered jumping on the back of the carriage, stowing himself beneath the dirty green tarpaulin and leaving Marumaru forever, but Josephine was sure to give him away.