The Killing Doll (12 page)

“Pancake make-up would be better,” Myra pursued. She loved giving cosmetic advice, advice on clothes, on “making the best of oneself,” and in doing so she forgot her original malice. “Or even Leichner stage make-up, a greenish powder maybe. You’d need an expert in techniques for covering scars, that sort of thing, but that’s not a problem, I mean, these people do exist.” She put out a hand and lifted the long lock of hair. Flushed with blood, the nevus burned a rich purple.

Dolly jerked backwards, pulled her hair out of Myra’s grasp and ran out of the front door. It was cooler this morning, quite cool and fresh, and the breezy emptiness of the street was like her own loneliness. She hated Myra, that went without saying, she loved Pup. Yet last night, simply by staying out, simply by not being there as he always was, he had taken a step away from her. Dolly felt colder than the temperature warranted. She longed for a friend to talk to. Why couldn’t a friend have come into the house instead of an enemy like Myra? When she reached the corner shop she realized she was holding her hair across her cheek, holding it with both hands, her shoulders hunched.

Myra never said a word about the doll. Perhaps she hadn’t seen it when she went in to take the wine, Dolly thought, or perhaps if she had noticed it she hadn’t recognized it, vain as she was, as representing herself. One afternoon when she had nothing else to do, Dolly made it an emerald green jacket from a scrap of material left over from a client’s dress. Emerald had been a fashionable color that summer.

The doll soon lost its companions. Miss Finlay bought one of the little girls with yellow plaits, Wendy Collins’s best friend had the Indian boy, and Mrs. Leebridge wanted the other little girl.

Dolly took it to Mrs. Leebridge’s flat herself. This was in Camden Town, in a block not far from the tube station. Mrs. Leebridge, large, flabby-fat, frog-faced, was perhaps the only person Dolly had ever known who could be in her company without reacting in some way or other to her nevus—without staring at it in fascination and then quickly looking away or ostentatiously not looking at her face at all ever or darting swift covert glances. Mrs. Leebridge behaved with Dolly just as she did with everyone else, noticing her only as a sponge to suck up the stream of self-love and boastfulness which poured from her thick flapping lips and the almost equally effusive adulation of everything pertaining to Roberta Fitter.

The doll was paid for, glanced at, then set aside and ignored. Mrs. Leebridge talked about how she herself had been privileged to see ectoplasm coming out of Mrs. Fitter’s chest and forehead in white streams. She showed Dolly photographs of spirit faces surrounded by ectoplasm and floating in the air and one of Mrs. Fitter in a trance with a long white tube coming out of her chest and a man’s face in a kind of balloon at the end of it.

“I hope you’ll come to another of our seances, dear.”

Dolly said she would think about it.

“I hope you’ll do more than think, dear. Only five pounds, that’s nothing these days, that’s less than you’d pay to go to a show in the West End.”

Dolly didn’t much like underground trains. You had to sit facing people and people in trains had nothing else to do but look at other people. But Mrs. Leebridge lived so near the station that it seemed stupid to hang about waiting for a bus.

It was just after 5:30. She was a hundred yards or so from the station entrance when she saw Myra ahead of her with her red bushy hair down on her shoulders and wearing the very sandals one of which Dolly had stuck by its heel into the neck of the Asti bottle. George Colefax’s practice was in Camden High Street and Myra must be on her way home from work.

Vaguely Dolly knew that Myra traveled by tube from Camden Town to Archway and caught a bus or more usually walked the half-mile or so home to Manningtree Grove. She disliked the idea of traveling home with Myra and she hung back a little until Myra had passed into the station and was lost to view.

Dolly wondered what Myra would say if she warned her off wearing that awful emerald green. No doubt it was all right for Myra to give people unwanted advice but not for them to give it to her. By the time Dolly came into the station Myra had disappeared and Dolly did not see her again until she came on to the platform.

There were a lot of people on the Barnet Line platform, though it was not densely packed. As usual, people had gathered themselves into groups, each separated from the next by a few feet, at the very edge of the platform. How they would know exactly where the doors would be when the train came in (for this was the reason for the mode of waiting), Dolly had never been able to understand. Myra was in the center of one of these groups in her emerald green cardigan. At some point between Dolly’s first sight of her and now, she had scooped up her hair in the way she often did, no doubt because of the heat—it was very hot down here in the tunnel—and had fastened it on to the back of her head with a large tortoiseshell slide Dolly had not seen before. It was interesting to someone fond of clothes and color to notice how a fashionable shade such as that green would occur regularly in every crowd, when you half-closed your eyes you could see dozens of bright spots of it against a uniformly drab background. It had been the same, she remembered, a year or so back when purple grape was “in” and during the months she called the “yellow summer.” Dolly herself was wearing a sand-colored coat and skirt, with a sand-and-blue-and-red check shirt and Pup’s amulet tucked away inside it because it did not quite “go.” She made her way through the press of people until she was behind Myra and within four or five feet of her. On the left of her stood a tall businessman in a chalk-stripe suit and on her right a plump elderly woman. Their bodies slightly overlapped Myra’s; she was a little nearer the edge of the platform than them. A bright segment of green cardigan, a scrap of green, white and navy check skirt, showed between their more sober gray and fawn, and this, as Dolly watched, was in turn covered by the slim shape of a young girl in the same fashionable green spotted with black. Dolly moved forward. The notice which announced incoming trains had lit up to indicate that the next one would be for Mill Hill East.

It seemed to Dolly that everyone was staring directly ahead, reading for perhaps the hundredth time the advertisement posters on the concave wall of the tunnel opposite or, as in the case of the man in chalk-striped gray, a folded newspaper held three or four inches from the eyes. Dolly hooked her handbag over her shoulder and looked down at her hands. She turned her hands over, palms uppermost, and looked at them. Images filled her mind: her mother shrouded and gliding across the dark stage, the rooms she and Pup now lived in, a pair of spotted tights lying by an open window, an amorphous greenness on which lay fiery hair. Suddenly she fancied she could smell lemons.

The girl in the green with the black spots on it stepped a little to one side. Dolly had not exactly pushed her but had thrust herself behind the man in gray and rather to the right of him so that the girl was obliged either to move or argue. She gave Dolly a huffy look and turned her head away. Dolly was aware of two more people, perhaps more than two, coming to stand immediately behind her and the girl. They pressed against her, not pushing, but standing very close. She could feel their warm breath on the back of her neck. It was very warm indeed in the tunnel and sweat prickled Dolly’s upper lip.

No one but the girl could have seen what she did with her hands and the girl had turned her face away in offense. Dolly held her now shaking hands at waist height. She could not see the train lines, the rails on which the wheels ran or the electrified rail between them but she knew they were down there, in the deep gulf between the platform and the concave wall. Last week, Pup had told her, the line between Mornington Crescent and Euston had been closed for two hours because someone had thrown himself on the line. Not in front of a train but just on to the electrified rail, and it had killed him. Of course, for good measure, if you wanted to commit suicide it would be a surer way to throw yourself over just when the train was coming in.

The light up the track at the far end was green now, awaiting the coming Mill Hill East train. Dolly could hear it in the distance and feel the wind that blew ahead of it. She held herself perfectly still, her eyes on that bright, virulent, poisonous green, which was all she could now see, which had expanded itself into a great green field crowding all her vision. Her throat was constricted and dry. She unclasped her hands and raised them, the palms a spare centimeter from the green jacket, the woolly pile of it brushing her hands. The train burst out of the tunnel mouth into the station and Dolly braced herself to push.

The elderly woman in brown turned round sharply. The twitch or start Dolly had made must somehow have alerted her. She took in the position of Dolly’s hands a second before Dolly snatched them away and her face, bun-like, motherly, one of those determinedly cheerful faces, was overspread with horrified disbelief.

The train stopped and the doors opened. There was a surge forward. Dolly turned and fought her way back through the crowd eager to get into the train. She pushed with her hands, with her arms and shoulders, coming, as she retreated in a panic, face to face with Myra.

11

S
he needed air. She sat on a wall, breathing deeply, feeling the damp breeze on her face. It was horrible to think of what she had nearly done, sent some stranger to her death by electrocution and under the wheels of a train. Myra had not even been at the front of the waiting crowd but well in the rear. Perhaps there had been some difficulty over her ticket or she had been delayed, talking to someone she knew. Whatever it was, the woman in the green coat that Dolly’s hands had almost pushed over that subterranean precipice had not been Myra, though she had been almost more Myra-like than her apparent double, for Myra, when Dolly came face to face with her, stared at her, passed her speechless, had been wearing a tan-colored skirt and her red fuzzy hair still hung about her shoulders.

And now Dolly thought of the pleasant bun face, briefly become horrified. Suppose that woman should pursue her, tell the police of her? Attempted murder, she thought, and she put up her hand to the nevus by which anyone who had seen her could identify her. She got up. She was afraid to go back into the station and began to walk rapidly up the Kentish Town Road.

A taxi came and she got into it. It was perhaps only the second taxi she had been in in her life, but she felt she couldn’t face any form of public transport. She was overwhelmed with dread of the police coming and the bun-faced woman with them, of knowing herself identified and hearing her action described. As soon as she was home she poured herself a big glass of red wine and it comforted her, it gave her courage. The second glassful she took with her into the temple. She thought she would hide there if they came and tried to find her. Before settling herself on the cushions, she moved to the altar to look at the elemental weapons as she always did on coming in here. Amid her fear it brought her a separate feeling of unease to see a film of dust lying on the dagger’s blade that Pup had used to keep so bright.

The doorbell ringing fetched her out on to the landing. Her father went to answer it and she expected the deep sound of men’s voices and the tramp of feet. But it was only Myra, who had forgotten her key. Dolly refilled her glass.

“I couldn’t get in the first train that came,” Myra said crossly. “It made me hours late. You’ll just have to have an omelette or something.”

Harold would rather have had tinned ravioli or a pork pie but there were no such things in the house or not down here. He was obliged to accept what Myra called a “souffle” omelette, this being the kind in which the whites of the eggs are separately beaten into stiff peaks. Harold thought it was like eating peppered and salted cotton wool but he didn’t let it bother him. He ate it with a fork held in his right hand, using his left to turn the pages of a reconstruction of the life of Henry II’s paramour Rosamund Clifford, which he had propped up against the cruet. Myra, breathing hard, took away his plate and handed him a crème caramel she had made the night before.

“I thang you!” said Harold, continuing to read. He had the lady encaged by the king in the middle of Woodstock maze.

Myra snatched the book and threw it on the coffee table.

“Steady on,” said Harold. “You’ve lost my place.”

“Well, for God’s sake, always reading at mealtimes.”

Harold licked his spoon. “I’ve finished now,” he said mildly. “Want to go up The Woman in White?”

Myra shrugged. They went. Ronald and Eileen Ridge were in the pub but they had little to say and Harold never said much. Myra, who had rather more to drink than usual, was almost silent.

“What’s up with you?” said Harold on the way back. “You got your visitor, is that it?”

Myra shook her head. She couldn’t be bothered to answer him, not even to tell him off for using vulgar euphemisms. She only wished she had got her “visitor.” Thirty-nine was young to have the menopause but not out of the question, she supposed. Not long ago she had read in a magazine at the hairdresser’s that it was normal to have the menopause any time between thirty-eight and fifty-five. But she was such a young thirty-nine! She was so pretty and with a young girl’s bloom on her, she couldn’t be having the change, could she? She couldn’t already be sliding into the gray sexless trough of middle age. Hair growing on the face, she thought, her waist thickening, hot flashes and all the rest of it. The other possible reason for a woman of thirty-nine missing a period she wasn’t even going to consider.

It was pointless worrying about it. She was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the letters of administration so that she could get at her mother’s bank account. Harold said it wasn’t right for her to keep going next door taking what she wanted out of the flat; she ought to wait till she got the okay to go ahead. Myra didn’t care. She seldom attended to Harold’s wishes these days. In the meantime she finished doing up the hall and when the paint was dry and the carpet down she fetched in two rugs from Mrs. Brewer’s living room, a console table and a framed reproduction of
The Laughing Cavalier.