The Killing Doll (11 page)

The curtains closed quickly. Hassan’s voice asked if there was anyone who had lost a four-footed companion. There were several replies to this, so it remained uncertain whose pet was the flickering white something that appeared briefly between the curtain hems or even what kind of animal it was. A bird materialized after that, or Mrs. Collins said it was a bird, she said she saw it come out between the curtains and perch on the red table lamp. Dolly didn’t see it but she was certain she felt its wings brush her face as it flew down the center of the hall. A woman sitting next to the man called Michael claimed it as her dead parakeet.

No more animals materialized but several more white figures came out, their robes reddened by the lamplight. The body of the hall was now totally dark because it had grown dark outside. There was a stillness and a quiet and then a fidgeting and whispering among the audience so that Dolly began to think the seance must be over. Hassan’s voice made her jump.

“Are there a brother and sister sitting together in the front row?

Dolly could not speak. It was Pup who answered.

“That’s the voice!”

Dolly began to tremble and Pup took her hand and held it tight. A strong lemony scent drifted from the stage and pervaded the hall.

10

T
he figure was tall and thin, faceless, a swaddled pillar of white sheet. The lamplight laid a red glaze on it, as on a cloth that has been used to wipe away blood. It swayed a little as it walked with mincing tread across the stage towards them.

“Is it you, Mother?” Dolly’s voice was unsteady.

Hoarsely, as if its throat were constricted, it spoke. “It makes me happy to see you two together.”

Dolly gasped. She reached out a hand yearningly. Then Pup too put out his hand and the apparition, swaying over them, clasped both in hers. Dolly felt thin bony fingers and a palm slippery with a clammy dew. In the darkness she tried to make out a feature, to recognize some defined angle of shoulder or hip, to sense the essence of her mother. The smell of lemons was overpowering. Pup raised himself up to look more closely, but immediately he did so, their hands were relinquished and the shape retreated. It glided away from them into the bloodstaining light, into the red air, and for a moment, before it disappeared between the curtains, its robes looked crimson. The curtains quivered and fell closed. Dolly gave a heavy sigh that made Pup turn and look anxiously at her, but she looked tranquil, she looked happy.

There were no more materializations. Hassan came out and said the medium had used up all her supply of ectoplasm and was in any case exhausted, that was enough for tonight, friends, and thank you very much. Dolly closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She felt as if her mother were still with her, still present in the hall. The central light was switched on and she blinked and sighed.

“Wonderful, isn’t she?” said Mrs. Leebridge. “You’ve never seen anything like that before, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Collins said it amounted to genius.

“There’s not a doubt about that.” Mrs. Leebridge went up to the cabinet and drew back the curtains and gave Mrs. Fitter a cigarette.

There was a scraping of chairs as people got up. The blinds were raised and you could see the dark blue night, a sliver of moon made dim by the shine from street lights.

Dolly said in a vague dreamy voice, “Mrs. Collins’s daughter is going to give us a lift home in her car.”

They filed out along the passage. The double doors were sheltered from the street by a porch with a gable and just inside the porch, beside the notice board, was standing the girl whose father had come out and saluted. In the quite bright electric light, Pup could see that she was a very pretty girl indeed. In fact she was not at all the sort of girl likely to be found in this company of the drab elderly, being about twenty and dressed in a very short navy blue dress with white coin spots, white tights and high-heeled red sandals. When she saw Pup she gave a nervous giggle.

“I know I’m a fool but I’m scared stiff to go out there in the dark.”

Mrs. Collins was indignant. “It makes me cross, that sort of thing. As if there was anything to be frightened of in our friends from the Other Side desiring a glimpse of their loved ones.”

“I can’t help it, I’m scared.”

Pup made a decision. She was looking at him, her soft red lips slightly parted. There was no doubt in his mind what was happening. Like Coward’s Amanda, his heart had always been jagged with sophistication, inexperienced though he was. The strange thing was that he hardly knew whether he was yielding to temptation or resisting it. All that was clear was that the time had come.

“Let me have the pleasure of seeing you home,” he said in his grave courteous way.

“Would
you?”

“Of course.”

Dolly was too preoccupied to feel much resentment. Besides, she wouldn’t be on her own, she would be in Wendy Collins’s car, so there was no need to feel nervous about “The Headsman,” as the papers called him. Of her mother she could not be afraid, though that gliding presence had in any case slipped away.

The car dropped her outside the house. She unlocked the front door and let herself in. The house was in darkness and there was a draft blowing through from the back. Dolly hesitated and then she went through into the dining room where the draft was coming from and put the light on. The French windows were wide open and the breeze had blown Myra’s new curtains so that one of them had wound itself round the standard lamp and the other been caught up on the back of a chair. There were two empty wine bottles on the ceramic top coffee table, which Dolly recognized as from her own stock, an empty glass and one half empty, and on the floor by the window one of Myra’s sandals and a pair of black spotted tights.

She closed the windows. She understood fairly well what had taken place and she shivered. The memory came to her very sharply of her mother in the white shroud and she seemed to feel again the damp coffin-cold hand. Somehow, although she knew her father was not really old, although Myra was quite young and what some would call attractive, she had believed the marriage had been made for convenience and companionship, what the French call a
mariage blanc.
Again she shuddered with disgust. On an impulse to admonish and insult, she stuck the heel of the sandal into the neck of one of the bottles and tied the tights round the other like a scarf round a snowman.

When she had done that, she was breathing like someone sobbing. All the joy and comfort of the evening was gone. She went upstairs, opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a tumblerful. If only Pup were there to talk to, if only he had come home with her! She had never discussed matters of that kind with him, he had seemed to her too young and innocent, but now she would not have been able to keep silent. Pup, though young, was wise; Pup had great ability to console. Thinking of the couple down below, directly below her, lying in a drunken satiated sleep, Dolly took her wine and sat in the window to wait for Pup to come.

Pup was in Hornsey. He was walking along slowly in the soft breezy late summer night.

“My girl friend got the tickets,” the girl was saying, “and then she couldn’t go. Well, she chickened out, if you ask me. I thought I’d go though just for a laugh. It was laugh, wasn’t it? My dad’s alive and well and living in Slough. What’s your name?”

“Peter.” Pup was digesting the implication of her last remark. “You don’t live at home then?”

“Me? You must be joking. I share with two other girls but they’re away. They’re students and their college isn’t back yet.”

Pup took her arm to cross the road and did not bother to release it when they got to the other side. She said she was called Suzanne. Her rounded golden-skinned arm was covered with soft down which for some reason had become erect.

“You want to come in for a bit?”

They had arrived outside a house not unlike the Yearmans’ but with a dozen bells by the front door. Suzanne’s flat was a very large room and a very small bathroom and a tiny kitchen. The overhead light failed to come on when she pressed the switch and she groped for the table lamp. Pup touched her arm, shook his head and put a match to the half-burnt candle that was stuck in a wine bottle by one of the beds.

She giggled. “I’m going to tell you something. I waited for you on purpose. There was an old woman offered me a lift but I said no.”

“I was looking at you all the evening,” Pup said. “I was thinking how beautiful you are.”

“Were you really?”

Pup put his arms round her and kissed her. He felt he did it rather well, considering he had never done it before but only seen it done by couples in the street and on Christopher Theofanou’s television. Suzanne responded so enthusiastically that Pup felt quite ill with excitement. What he would have liked and wondered if this was what all men would really like, would have been to tear all her clothes off and rape her in one minute flat.

Impossible, of course. He said in a cool conversational tone: “I’ve got news for you. I’m an innocent virgin.”

She stared. “You’re kidding.”

“No, it’s the truth.” He smoothed back the dark curly hair, looked into her eyes. He let his hands slide to her shoulders and then enclose her soft full breasts. Pup had read a lot of books, including novels. “But I’m young and strong. You’ll have to teach me. Will that be all right?”

“Wow,” said Suzanne. “You bet it will.”

Dolly waited for him. She refilled her tumbler with wine. It was an hour and a half since Pup had parted from her to see the girl home. Of course the girl might live miles and miles away and perhaps they had had to wait for a bus and perhaps now Pup was waiting for a bus home. She might live in Wood Green or Hackney or almost anywhere in north London.

Pup was so small and slight. In the dark or at a distance he might easily be taken for a girl. The Headsman might take him for a girl. Dolly began to pace up and down but she was unsteady on her feet, the wine had done that for her. Midnight, half-past, ten to one. Suppose he had missed the last bus? Would he attempt to walk? Dolly poured herself more wine. She wanted to scream out her terror that something had happened to Pup. He might be walking home, he might meet The Headsman or that gang that roamed the council estate.

She longed for him. She began to count, one, two, three, when I get to a hundred I shall hear his key in the lock, I shall hear him coming up the stairs. Ninety-nine, a hundred … The house was utterly silent, the world was silent, even the perpetual traffic seemed to have ceased. Dolly fell on her knees.

The Yearmans were not a religious family. God had not inhabited Dolly’s childhood or done much more than nod in passing through school RI lessons. She found herself praying to the specter that had swayed across the stage in Mount Pleasant Hall.

“Mother, protect Pup and bring him safe home to me …”

She would never be able to sleep. What was the use of going to bed? She finished the wine in the bottle, opened a second one. It was two o’clock. Another tumblerful finished her. She crept, she crawled, across the hall and fell on to her bed in a stupor.

At 7:30 on Saturday morning Pup came home. It was a beautiful morning and he felt jaunty and light on his feet and full of joy. As he let himself into the house it occurred to him that it would not behoove him to show these feelings, so, with his story ready, nursing the secret knowledge of his date for six o’clock that evening—a story prepared to cover that, too—he came in a contained and rather diffident way up the stairs. He need not have worried. Dolly was still asleep. Harold was still asleep. Myra was awake and up and in the bathroom, taking aspirins, remembering what had happened. Her former lascivious feelings of exultation in sacrificing her beauty to gray old Harold had changed to revulsion, even shame. She pulled her bright green toweling dressing gown round her and tried to face the day ahead.

The day ahead was faceable for Dolly when she saw that Pup’s bedroom door, which had been open when she went to bed, was now closed. Her head was pounding and she felt weak at the knees. Never before had she drunk so much wine at one go. She went down to the bathroom and had two aspirins out of the bottle Myra had left standing on top of the lavatory cistern. Her hair was all over the place. She damped it and combed it out and pulled a curtain of it carefully down to cover half her cheek. Instant coffee would help but she and Pup were out of coffee. She got her purse and key.

Myra was in the hall, her face haggard, her hair scooped up and pinned on the crown of her head. The green she wore looked iridescent to Dolly’s morning-tender eyes, it was so bright. She pounced on Dolly.

“Surely it wasn’t necessary to do that? I mean, go in there and shut the window, yes, but my sandal stuck there like that and my—” Myra could not bring herself to say the word. Her face was red and working. Nor could she mention the doll. She had meant to, had planned to, but she couldn’t.

“It was my wine,” Dolly said.

“Well, agreed, of course it was. And if you’d been at home I wouldn’t have dreamed of such a thing without asking. I was going to put it back. First thing this morning, I was going to replace that wine and the fact is if you hadn’t gone in there to shut that window, which to be perfectly honest was no damn business of yours anyway, you’d never have known a thing about it.”

“A person likes privacy.”

“You’d better lock your doors then.” Myra had forgotten all about wanting to be friends with Dolly. She thought she could see in Dolly’s eyes knowledge of what had happened on the previous evening, knowledge and scorn, so she lashed back in the way some people do when their antagonist has a disability.

“You don’t imagine doing your hair like that hides that thing on your face, do you? Frankly, Doreen, it draws attention to it.”

No one, ever, had referred to Dolly’s nevus in any fashion comparable to this. She could hardly believe what she had heard. But she had heard it and she was aware that she would feel the full pain of it later. Blushing deeply, she turned instinctively away; humiliated, she performed the more deeply humiliating act of presenting her “good” cheek to Myra.