On a shelf in our spare room stands the figure of a girl. She is slender, long-limbed, hair falling to just below her shoulder blades. Her back is gracefully arched, her head held at a pensive tilt; pale fingers clutch a broad-brimmed hat with a blue bow. Above her snubbed nose, black eyes are fixed wistfully on the middle distance – caught, perhaps, in the act of waiting for a young man to ask her to dance. According to the stamp underneath her feet, this girl was handmade in Spain in 1978 by the Lladró ceramics company.
The figurine is my own chief example of an object that all of us, I suspect, have somewhere in our possession. A gift, once prized, whose historic emotional significance far outweighs our actual feelings about it.
I find the girl’s pose fey, simpering, twee. That’s why she has long been banished to our spare room; and why, quite regularly – dusting her, or even just catching sight of her as I pass by – I contemplate swaddling her in bubble wrap and taking her to a charity shop. But I can’t do it.
The porcelain girl has been in my possession since 2000, when my grandmother Eunice gave the figurine to me in what seemed, then, a symbolic gesture, marking my passage into womanhood. I had loved her passionately from the age of six, when I’d first noticed her standing demurely on my grandparents’ cabinet. “Isn’t she beautiful?” said my grandmother, an enthusiastic collector of Lladró. “That’s what you’ll look like one day.” And to emphasise the sincerity of her statement, she offered to give me the figurine when I turned 18 – a promise that she did, indeed, keep.
I don’t look like the figurine, of course; I never have. That’s another reason why just setting eyes on her triggers a cloudburst of contradictory emotions. I was an overweight child, greasy-haired and myopic, and was bullied for a time at primary school. Through those miserable years, that figurine staring out beatifically from her perch in my grandparents’ living room seemed like a vision from a dream: a shimmering, unattainable image of a girl – pretty, slim, balletic. I tried many times to persuade my grandmother to let me take her home with me, as if just keeping her close would exert some sort of talismanic power; but she would not be swayed.
Gradually, as I grew older, the figurine’s powers began to wane. At home in London, all thoughts of her slipped from my mind; and when I did see her at my grandparents’ house near Bristol, I began to think that this was not the sort of girl I wanted to be anyway. She did not look like a girl who had ever been given detention, or got drunk on snakebite, or taught herself to play bass guitar.
She looked like a sit-quietly-and-be-good kind of girl; a sugar-and-spice girl. Yes, I still wished I was as effortlessly slender as her – I knew even then that I would probably always wish that, for reasons I would never fully understand – but her dress was ugly, her hat silly, and what was she standing around waiting for anyway? Why didn’t she just get on and do whatever she wanted to do?
And so, by the time I turned 18 - as tall as the figurine (proportionately speaking), and most of that puppy fat finally melted away – I was ready to tell my grandmother not to give me the present; to keep hold of that girl in her pink dress. But I couldn’t, of course. Not when she presented the figurine to me so generously, as the gift I’d waited for so long. “Here you are,” she said. “She’s yours at last.”
I thanked her, took the figurine home, and left the girl in a drawer at my mother’s house while I went off to study, travel, work, and share flats with friends. There she stayed until the year my grandmother died, when I retrieved the porcelain girl from her hiding place, and took her back to the flat I was sharing with my fiance.
She has now moved house with us three times, and her position in our spare room is, I suspect, secure. For such a gift does, I can see now, carry a talismanic power – though not of the sort I once believed it did. Caught in that figurine’s sculpted face, in the sweep of her hair, in the static folds of her dress, is not the promise of the girl I once wished I could be, but the trace of the grandmother I loved, and still miss.
• Laura Barnett’s debut novel The Versions of Us is out now
