Dolly (7 page)

It was a baby doll, large and made of china, with staring blue eyes and a rosebud mouth in a smooth, expressionless face. It wore a white cotton nightdress and beside it was a glass feeding bottle.

Neither Edward nor Kestrel ever forgot the next
moments. Leonora looked at the doll, her body rigid, her hands clenched. Then, with what sounded like a growl which rose in pitch from deep in her throat into her mouth and became a dreadful animal howl, she lifted it out of the box, turned and hurled it at the huge marble fireplace. It hit a carved pillar and there was a crack as it fell, one large piece and a few shards broken from the head to leave a jagged hollow, so that in his shock Edward wondered crazily if brains and blood might spill out and spread over the hearth tiles.

There was a silence so absolute and terrible that it seemed anything might have happened next, the house split down the middle or the ground open into a fiery pit, or one of them to drop down dead.

Leonora ran. Her footsteps went thundering up the stairs and they could hear them, even louder, even faster, as she reached the top flights. The door of her bedroom slammed shut.

Aunt Kestrel seemed to have difficulty catching her breath and at last Edward said, ‘I’m sure she didn’t mean to be hurtful.’

She looked at him out of eyes whose centres were like brilliant pin-points of light but said nothing. Edward went to the doll in the hearth, picked it up, together with the broken pieces of china head, and trailed out, afraid to speak, even to glance at Aunt Kestrel.

The attic floor was dark and silent. He hesitated at Leonora’s door and listened. She must have heard him come upstairs and stop and did not want to see him. He went into his own room, carrying the doll, switched his bedside lamp on and sat down with it on his bed. The single large piece of china from its damaged head could probably be glued back, but the shards and fragments he thought were far too small. He sat holding it, wondering what he could do.

‘Poor Dolly,’ he said, holding it in his arms, rocking and stroking it.

The doll stared blankly, the crevasse in its china skull jagged, with cracks now running from it down the face like the spider cracks in walls. But he was bleary with tiredness and returned the doll to its box, put the lid back on and pushed it under his bed.

He slept restlessly, as if he had a fever, hearing the crack of the china doll hitting the fireplace and seeing Leonora’s twisted, furious little face as she hurled it, and the wind howling through a crack in the window frame mingled with her scream. It was not yet midnight by his small travelling clock when he woke again. The wind still howled but in between he heard something else, fainter, and not so alarming.

He went out onto the landing. The wind was muffled and now he heard it more clearly he thought it was the sound of Leonora’s crying. Her door was closed. Edward put his ear close to the wood. Silence. He waited. Still silence. He turned the handle slowly and eased open the door a very little. He could hear Leonora’s very soft breathing but nothing else, no sobbing, no snuffling, nothing at all to show that she was crying now or had just been crying.

He could not go back to sleep, because of the wind and remembering the scene earlier, and because, when he lay down, he could hear the faint sound again. It was coming from beneath his bed, where the doll lay in its box. He sat bolt upright and shook his head to and fro hard to clear the sound but it had not gone away when he stopped. The wind was dying down and before long it died altogether and then his room was frighteningly silent except for the crying.

He was not a cowardly boy, though he had a natural cautiousness, but for a long time he lay, not daring to lean over and pull the box out from under the bed. He had no doubt that the sound came from it and he knew that he was awake, no longer in the middle of a nightmare, and that a china doll could not cry.

The crying went on.

When he gathered enough courage to open the box, taking the lid off slowly and moving each layer of tissue paper round the doll with great caution, he looked at the broken face and saw nothing, no fresh cracks or marks and above all, no tears and no changed expression to one of sadness or distress. The doll still stared out sightlessly and when he touched it the china was cold as cold.

He waited. Nothing. He covered the doll and moved it back out of sight. He lay down. The soft crying began again at once.

Edward got out of bed and switched on his lamp, took the box and without opening it again, carried it over to the deep cupboard and climbed onto a wooden stool. He put the box on the top shelf and pushed it as far to the back as he could, into the pitch darkness and dust.

‘Now be quiet,’ he said, ‘please stop crying and be quiet.’

He lay still for a long time, his ears straining to hear the faintest sound from the cupboard. But there was none. The doll was silent.

For the next three nights the doll cried until Aunt Kestrel asked Edward why he was white-faced with dark stains beneath his eyes, from lack of sleep. He said nothing to anyone and Leonora had spent little time with him. She had been in disgrace, forbidden to go outside, forbidden to have toys, kept to her room until she gave what Aunt Kestrel called ‘a heartfelt apology’. Edward had crept in a couple of times and found her sitting staring out of the window, or lying on her back on the bed, not reading, not sleeping, just looking up at the ceiling. He had offered to stay, told her he was sorry, that he would ask Aunt Kestrel to let her come outside, suggested this or that he could bring to her. She had
either not replied or shaken her head, but once, she had looked at him and said, ‘Mrs Mullen said I was possessed by a demon. I think that may be true.’

He had told her demons did not exist, that she simply had a bad temper and would learn to overcome it, but she said it was not just a bad temper, it was an evil one. Mrs Mullen had brought her boiled fish, peas and a glass of water on a tray and told her she was bringing badness upon the house.

‘I am, I am.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m very bored. I wish you would apologise and then you could come out and we could do something, walk along the river and watch the lock open or look for herons.’

But she had yawned and turned away.

The doll cried for a fourth night and this time he climbed up to the shelf and took it down. It lay in its box, stiff and still, looking like a body in a coffin.

And realising that, he knew what he should do.

He was sure he should do it by himself. Leonora was likely to scream or have a fright, behave stupidly or tell Aunt Kestrel. The prospect only frightened him a little.

Leonora was allowed downstairs, though because
she had stood in front of Aunt Kestrel with a mutinous face and refused to apologise, she was still forbidden the outside world.

It was hot again, the sun blazing out of an enamel blue sky, the fens baked and the channels running dry but when Edward woke at five the air still had a morning damp and freshness. He dressed in shorts and shirt, and put on his plimsolls which made no noise.

He looked in the box. Dolly lay still in her tissue paper shroud, though he had heard the crying as he went to sleep and when he woke once in the night.

Someone would hear him, the stairs would creak, the door key would make a clink, the door would stick, as it did after rain. He waited, holding his breath, for Mrs Mullen to appear and ask what he was doing, or Aunt Kestrel to take the box and order him back to bed.

But he went stealthily, made no sound. No one heard him, no one came.

The road to the church was dusty under the early morning sun. Smoke curled from the chimney of the lock keeper’s cottage beside the water. The dog barked. A heron rose from the river close beside him, a great pale ghost flapping away low over the fen.

He was afraid of the churchyard, afraid of the gnarled trunks of the yew trees and the soft swish of tall grasses against his legs. At the back, against the wall, the gravestones were half sunken into the earth, their stone lettering too worn away or moss-covered to read. No one left flowers here, no one cleared and tidied. No one remembered these ancient dead. He wondered about what was under the soil and inside the coffins, imagined skulls and bones stretched out.

He had brought a tin spade he had found in a cupboard. Its edge was rough and the wooden handle wobbled in its shaft and when he started trying to dig with it into the tussocks of grass he realised it would break before he had broken into the ground. But further along the grass petered out to thin soil and pine needles and using the spade and his hands, he dug out enough. It took a long time. His hands blistered quickly and the blisters split open and his arms tired. A thrush came and pecked at the soil he had uncovered and a wagon went down the road. He ducked behind the broad tree trunk.

When he came to bury the doll in its small cardboard coffin he thought he should say a prayer, as people always did at funerals, but it was not easy to think of suitable words.

‘Oh God, let Dolly lie in peace without crying.’

He bowed his head. The thrush went on pecking at the soil, even after he had dragged it over the coffin and the grave with his tin spade.

When he slipped back into the house, he heard Mrs Mullen from the kitchen, and his aunt moving about her room. It was after seven o’clock.

No one found out. No one took the slightest notice of him, he was of no account. A telegram had arrived saying that Leonora’s mother was in London and waiting for her, she should be put on the train as soon as possible that day.

‘I long for her,’ Aunt Kestrel said, as she finished reading the telegram out.

Mrs Mullen, setting down the silver pot of coffee on its stand, made a derisive sound under her breath.

The morning was a scramble of boxes and trunks and people flying up and down the stairs. Edward went outside, afraid to be told that he was getting underfoot, the image of the silent, buried doll filling his mind. He did not know what he might do if Leonora asked for it.

She did not. She stood in the hall surrounded by
her luggage, her hair tied back in a ribbon which made her look unfamiliar, already someone he did not know. He could not picture where she was going to, or imagine her mother and the latest stepfather.

‘I will probably never see you again,’ she said. The station taxi was at the door and Aunt Kestrel was putting on her hat, looking in her bag. She would see Leonora onto the train.

‘You might,’ Edward said. ‘We are cousins.’

‘No. Our mothers hated one another. I think we will be strangers.’

She put out a slender, cool hand and he shook it. He wanted to say something more, remind her of things they had said to one another, what had happened, what they had shared, to hold onto this strange, interesting holiday. But Leonora was already somewhere else and he sensed that she would not welcome such reminders.

He watched her walk, stiff-backed, down the path, her luggage stowed away in the taxi, Aunt Kestrel fussing behind her.

‘Goodbye, Leonora,’ he said quietly.

She did not look round, only climbed in to the taxi and sat staring straight ahead as the car moved off. She did not glance back at him, or at Iyot House, which he understood was for her already part of the
past and moving farther and farther away as the taxi wheels turned.

The sound of the motor died away.

‘And good riddance,’ Mrs Mullen said from the hall. ‘That’s a bad one and brought nothing but bad with her, so be glad she’s gone and pray she’s left none of it behind her.’

Edward woke in the middle of the night to a deathly stillness, in the house and outside, and remembered that he was alone in the attics. Aunt Kestrel was two floors below, Mrs Mullen in the basement. Leonora had gone.

He closed his eyes and tried to picture a sea of black velvet, which he had once been told was the way to bring on sleep, and after a time he did fall into drowsiness, but through it, in the distance, he heard the sound of paper rustling and the muffled crying of Dolly, buried beneath the earth.

I was abroad when I had the letter telling of my Aunt Kestrel’s death. She was over ninety and had been in a nursing home and failing for some time. I had always sent her birthday and Christmas cards and presents but I had seen her very little since the holidays I spent at Iyot as a boy and now, as one always does, I felt guilty that I had not made more effort to visit her in her old age. I am sure she must have been lonely. She was an intelligent woman with many interests and one who was happy in her own company. She was not a natural companion for a small boy but she had always done her best to ensure that I was happy when I stayed there and as I grew older I had been able to talk to her more about the
things that interested her and which I was beginning to learn a little about – medieval history, military biography, the Fenlands, and her impeccable botanical illustrating.

I was saddened by her death and planned to return for her funeral but the day after I received the news, I had a letter from her solicitor informing me that Aunt Kestrel had given him strict and clear instructions that it was to be entirely private, followed by cremation, and so anxious had she been not to have any mourners that the day and time were being kept from everyone save those immediately involved and the lawyer himself. But he concluded: ‘However, I have Mrs Dickinson’s instructions that she wishes you and your cousin, Mrs Leonora Sebastian to attend my office, on a day to be arranged to your convenience, to be told the contents of her Will, of which I am the executor.’

I wrote to Leonora at the last address I had but I had had no contact with her for some years. I knew that she had married and been divorced and thought she sounded like her mother’s daughter, but she had not replied to my last two cards and had apparently dropped out of sight.

Then, the evening I received the solicitor’s letter,
she telephoned me. I had just arrived back in London. She sounded as I might have expected, haughty and somewhat brusque.