The Killing Doll (13 page)

Yellow leaves fell gently on to the yellowed grass of the old railway line. A sinking sun put forth mild gleams through the smoky autumnal haze. Pup and Suzanne walked along hand-in-hand. They had been to the cinema in Muswell Hill because on Saturdays the students spent all afternoon beautifying themselves and did not go out before evening.

From time to time, they stopped and kissed or stood embraced or simply stood still, hugging each other and gazing into each other’s eyes. They behaved as all young lovers do who are suffering from temporary frustration, causing embarrassment to the few people who passed them and who had forgotten what it feels like to be nineteen or so and forced by circumstances to go to the cinema instead of to bed.

By six, the student who was going to see her mother would have gone and seven would see the departure of the student who was going out with her boy friend. Pup kissed Suzanne on the bridge at Stanhope Road and hurried her down the steps. They did not see Myra but she saw them. She had been down to Crouch End Broadway for an evening paper and a packet of Rennie’s for her indigestion and she saw them as she was walking back to Manningtree Grove. Dolly was coming down the stairs as she let herself into the house and would have walked past Myra with averted eyes.

Myra said loudly, “It’s ridiculous you taking this attitude, Doreen. What have I done, I should like to know? Tried to help you, that’s all.”

Dolly opened the front door in silence.

“Let me tell you,” said Myra, getting closer to the bone than she guessed, “you’re going to need friends one of these fine days. When you’re all on your own you’re going to need friends. You won’t always have your brother.”

Still Dolly did not speak but she hesitated.

“You won’t always have your brother dancing attendance on you. He’ll want to lead his own life, he’ll want to get married, won’t he? As a matter of fact I’ve just seen him walking along with a girl—hand-in-hand, to be perfectly honest with you. Rather a tarty-looking girl, I must say, but we’ll let that pass. You didn’t know? You actually didn’t know, did you? Well, I’m sorry if it’s been a shock but it’s always better to know, isn’t it? I can’t honestly say it didn’t look like they’d got a serious thing going because, frankly, it did.”

Dolly, as on the previous occasion, went quietly out into the street and closed the door behind her. A feeling of sickness which had nothing to do with what had just passed, which had in fact come over her in just the same way on the previous evenings, now overwhelmed Myra. She retched, clapped her hand over her mouth, and rushed for the kitchen sink. Harold, sitting in the breakfast room in one of the few remaining old armchairs, looked up from Robert K. Massie’s
Nicholas and Alexandra
at the sounds of vomiting. This was his last remaining sanctum but even here the wallpaper had been stripped from one of the walls and Myra’s paintpots already stood on newspapers on the gateleg table. He got up, put his head round the door, and called out that it must be the paint getting at her, maybe she had a paint allergy.

“You’re just trying to stop me making the place look nice,” Myra shouted back.

It can’t be true, it can’t be true, a voice cried to Dolly. The voice was in her head but it was like her mother’s voice. She had been going out for wine. Not to the shop in Northwood Road —since The Headsman she went there no more—but to the nearest place, the wine supermarket in the Broadway. She had one bottle left, she could get more tomorrow. She walked round the block, came back to the house and ran upstairs. On the top landing she thought she smelt lemons, just for a moment and then the whiff of it was gone.

Her mother’s voice said quite clearly, out loud, “It’s true!”

Could she ask Pup? Would she dare? How could she ask him anyway, when she never saw him, when he was never there? It
was
true and she would lose him. She had never thought of the possibility of this before, that Pup might leave her for another woman. Somehow, without formulating it in words, she had believed he and she would be together, celibate and holding themselves apart, all their lives. She imagined him and this girl, hand-in-hand, walking home through the October twilight to her home. The mother opening the door to them, tea with the family, Pup the recognized accepted suitor. Oh, the pain of it, the unspeakable agony of it!

She opened that last bottle of wine and poured a tumblerful and drank it down like a thirsty person drinks water. If only he would come! If he came now, she thought she would have the courage to ask him. But he wouldn’t come, he wouldn’t come till the deep middle of the night. She tried to think of other things. Often she felt it should have weighed on her more, what she had done on the station platform at Camden Town, or what she had meant to do and would have done but for the bun-faced woman. Her mind reverted to it and sweat broke over her as she thought of what might have happened.

But it was not a powerful enough diversion to distract her from Pup for long. The tears were running down her face. She took a duster into the temple and dusted the things on the altar, and as she worked she cried. Pup’s golden robe hung neglected on the back of the door, a half-burned candle lay on its side in a heap of joss-stick ash. Dolly blew off the dust that had settled on the books, the four volumes of
The Golden Dawn,
the heavy tome that was
The Chaldean Oracles of Zoroaster,
the slimmer
Book of the Dead, The Key of Solomon.
She cleaned it all up and tidied it and then she sat on the floor and wept. Just before 8:00, she went out to buy more wine and, passing the bathroom door, heard Myra being sick inside.

In the hairdressers’ on Monday afternoon Myra read in a magazine an article called “Those Different Pregnancies” which said that some pregnant women were sick in the evenings, not the mornings, they might even be sick or feel queasy all day long. Myra, under the dryer, felt hot already. Now the sweat broke from her and ran down her sides. She couldn’t be pregnant, could she? It was seven weeks since she had had a period and five weeks and a bit since that stupid business when they had drunk the wine to celebrate her mother’s money. But even so, she couldn’t be pregnant by old Harold, it just wasn’t possible.

With the married man she had been on the pill but it wasn’t wise to stay on that indefinitely so, when she had come off it, sometimes she had taken care of that side of things and sometimes he had. Often she hadn’t been very careful. A psychiatrist would say, Myra knew from her magazines, that this was because she had unconsciously wanted a child. And maybe she had, maybe she had thought that would have fetched him permanently to her, in spite of his wife. Yet for all that passion, for all that love-making, two or three times in an afternoon sometimes, Myra had never even had a false alarm. And she had been young then, she thought sadly, and he young and strong, a big virile man who had fathered two children on his wife. It wasn’t possible that she had never conceived in all those years, yet now be pregnant by puny old Harold.

Walking home from the station over the Archway bridge and down Hornsey Lane, she met Harold and Pup coming home from the shop via the library. Pup was carrying his father’s books under his arm. That was something that maddened Myra—the idea of being married to someone who had to have things carried for him by a younger and stronger man. It was half-past five and she was starting to feel sick again.

“Not going out with your friend tonight then?” Dolly said as Pup walked in.

Pup shook his head. Suzanne had a week’s holiday and, long before she had met him, had fixed up to go to Corfu with a girl friend—the same one who had chickened out of the seance—and she couldn’t cancel it, she’d paid 100 pounds in advance. Pup was wondering how he would get on without her. He sat down to his corned beef and Marks & Spencers ratatouille, a carton of tropical fruit juice, and a rum baba.

All day Dolly had been screwing herself up to this, rehearsing what to say. And there was always the fear he wouldn’t come home anyway. When at last she did speak, it was with apparent insouciance.

“This friend of yours, it’s a girl, isn’t it?”

Pup hesitated. He put down his knife and fork. He knew very well, almost precisely in fact, how Dolly felt about him. She was even more possessive of him than Dilip Raj’s mother was of her son. And Dilip Raj’s mother didn’t have a birthmark slapped on the side of her face like a great crimson pancake. Pup understood it all. “Yes, it is,” he said gently, and then, “How did you know?”

Dolly didn’t answer. “Pup, is it serious? You aren’t thinking of getting married, are you?”

“Of course not,” said Pup with perfect truth.

Dolly had gone white but now her color came back, though she was still breathless.

“‘Of course not’ to what? It isn’t serious or you aren’t getting married?”

“Both,” said Pup. “Neither. Anyway, she’s not here any more, she’s gone away. Now you can tell me how you knew.”

She used his name for Myra. She was happy and she made a sound that was nearly a giggle. “Our wicked stepmother.”

He shrugged at that. Dolly watched him eat the rum baba and drink up his fruit juice. She was drinking Mosel herself, just starting on the second bottle, and working on a new doll, a ballet girl with black hair and a tutu.

When he had finished, Pup went into the temple. It suddenly seemed very small. Virginity is an asset to a geomancer. Maiden virtue holds some special qualities that are dissipated by sexual experience. Pup had known this long before he yielded to temptation (or resisted the temptation to keep himself pure and aloof) because the price he was paying in avoiding sex was very high and his diffuse, urgent desires had to be constantly assaulted by invocation and banishing rituals.

But the effect of terminating chastity was dramatic. He could no longer do magic. It was true, just as the books said, the gift was lost, the power vanished.

He stood in the temple and looked about him and saw a poky attic bedroom with streaky black walls and bits of rubbish lying on an old bamboo table. The idea of making holy water or burning incense seemed grotesque. He could not imagine chanting all that Hebrew mumbo-jumbo, at least not
seriously.
He had abandoned his chastity and the power had gone.

Or could it be that something more easily explainable had happened? Here Pup’s strong vein of common sense asserted itself. Could it be instead that now he had discovered sex, the things which he had done before now seemed mere childish substitutes for it? Very likely. Most probably it was both these explanations which contributed to his feeling of boredom about the temple and what had gone on in it.

He looked regretfully at his collection of books. He thought of all the knowledge he had accumulated. It was a pity to waste it. Perhaps he need not waste it. Considering the enormous store Dolly had learned—had been taught, he thought, by him—to set on magic and the rituals and all the jiggery-pokery of it, it would be unkind and unwise altogether to abandon it. He loved Dolly. But, oh, how he loved this new glory that had entered his life! The two loves seemed incompatible unless he could achieve some compromise and achieve it through his lost magical skills.

Pup stood at the window in the temple, thinking of all this, holding the silly knife with its crudely painted handle, watching the blackened leaves drop from the fruit trees and float slowly down on to the wet grass. A plan, daring yet simple, was beginning to take shape in his mind.

12

D
ismay was what most women felt in the presence of Yvonne Colefax. If a woman knew she was going to see Yvonne, she would dress carefully and pay particular attention to her face and hair only to find that she was still inadequate, she was still not in competition. Yvonne inspired dismay and a resigned sinking of the heart. One remembered her as beautiful but generally as less beautiful than she was, so that each time one saw her afresh, it was with shock that she was so much lovelier than one had expected.

Two things about her consoled Myra. One was that Yvonne was nice, she was what people call “always the same” and that sameness was to be simple, childlike, and friendly, and the other was that the one person on earth Yvonne wanted to be noticed and admired by did not seem to see his wife as anything out of the ordinary. More than that, he seemed to prefer almost anyone’s company to hers, and if there was ever a case of a man treating his wife like a servant and his home like an hotel, this was it. Myra wouldn’t have put up with it for a moment, let alone five years or however long it had been that George and Yvonne had been married. Yvonne might have a Porsche to drive about in and a wonderful house just off the Bishop’s Avenue but that, Myra reflected sententiously, was no substitute for respect and consideration. And here was Yvonne, being George’s doormat again or at least his errand girl, running down to Camden Town with something else George had forgotten when she must surely have better things to do with her time.

Yvonne came up to the desk where Myra sat in the front hall. Myra had forgotten just how pale and fair and soft her hair was, like dandelion fluff. And how slim she was, slender enough to bring a pang to almost any woman’s heart, and how aquamarine blue her eyes. She was never overdressed, never unsuitably dressed, but for all that she didn’t dress like other people but rather like someone in a film or television play whose garments have been very carefully chosen by experts and whose accessories are all exactly the same shade. The expert was, of course, Yvonne herself and this morning she looked like the young Faye Dunaway dressed for the part of a woman from the East Seventies going shopping in Saks Fifth Avenue. Camel-colored suit with a thin brown belt and tall, narrow, shining brown boots as bright as chestnuts and a rakish little white felt hat with a brown ribbon. The scent of Ivoire overcame that of the pine air-freshener with which they sprayed out the waiting room each morning.

“You look absolutely amazing,” said Myra generously. “You off somewhere exciting?”

“Just out shopping,” said Yvonne as Myra had known she would. “George rang and said would I get him a Higginson’s and bring it in, so I have. Here it is.”