The Killing Doll (15 page)

Dolly was sitting with the doll on her lap. With her legs crossed, her hair hanging forward over her bent head, the crude metal talisman dangling from her neck, she looked like a little girl. Pup felt a fierce yet exasperated pity for her, he felt she was like an albatross or a millstone around his neck. He put out his hand for the doll and dropped it so that it flopped on its back in the middle of the pentagram.

“Give her a pain,” Dolly said viciously. “She’s had a lot of trouble with her stomach lately. Give her—give her appendicitis!”

“That’s a bit strong,” Pup said.

He turned to the east and made the Cabalistic Cross and then he began on the Inscription of the Pentagram. This was a Lesser Banishing ritual but he had forgotten the proper order of words and soon he was muddling it up with bits of consecration formulae and Hexagrammic rituals and invocations and all sorts.

For a short while at school he had done Latin. He recited the few declensions and conjugations he remembered. Then he abandoned that, prepared holy water, and scattered it about, walking round and round the circle until he was giddy. His sleeve, falling back as he raised the wand in his hands, showed him the time by his watch. Ten-fifteen. He could stop soon.

When he had recited all the Hebrew names he knew and all the Egyptian ones and all the names of Greek gods and goddesses that he could remember, when he had said prayers frontwards and repeated them backwards, he seized the dagger from the altar. He held the dagger high above his head, a tall, commanding figure whose golden robe shivered and shimmered in the light from the candles.

Dolly gave a little gasp. Pup plunged forward in a swoop that was almost that of a
samurai
in its grace, and thrust the dagger’s point through the belly of the doll with a sure stroke. For a moment or two the doll remained impaled on Pup’s dagger and he had to draw it off with his other hand. Some of the stuffing came out and a fat worm of cotton wool like an entrail. Dolly looked as if she were going to clap but as if clapping would somehow be out of place. She got up, leaving the wounded doll where it lay. Pup pulled off his robe and blew out the candles.

Back in their living room, Dolly poured the last of the wine into her glass. The wind sang round the house and rattled the old window sashes in their frames. As she had come into the room after the ceremonies, her mother had spoken to her quite clearly and in her normal speaking voice:

“It’s going to be a wild night.”

Edith had always been one to comment on the weather. “Cold enough for you?” she would say or “This rain will get rid of the fog,” or something like that. Now, as Dolly stood by the mantelpiece on which the ballet girl doll now sat alone, as she stood sipping her wine, Edith came very close to her in a breeze of lemon scent and whispered: “I never did like a wind, I’d rather anything but wind.”

Pup came in and Dolly hoped their mother would speak again so that he could hear her, but Edith was silent.

“Can you smell anything?”

“Candles?” said Pup.

Dolly shook her head. “Come on, I’ll make us both a cup of cocoa.”

They were out on the landing, in the dark, and this time it was he who asked the question: “Did you hear anything?”

“The wind,” said Dolly. She put out her hand for the light switch but could not find it.

“It sounded more like a cry,” Pup said. He put the light on and they went into the kitchen.

In there, the window was too small for curtains. The panes rattled with a monotonous regular thudding. Dolly began heating milk in a saucepan and got out the tin of drinking chocolate. The window rattled, the wind made a keening sound as it rushed through the old railway line, and downstairs from immediately below them came a slither and a heavy thud.

Dolly clutched Pup’s arm. “Whatever is it? D’you think someone’s got in down there.”

“It was in the bathroom. The bathroom light’s been on for ages. You can see it on the grass out there.” He went back to the landing and looked down the stairwell. “I wonder if Dad’s all right.”

“We’d better go down.”

The milk rose up in the saucepan and streamed down over the gas ring. Pup turned the gas off. They went down and tried the bathroom door. It was locked. The door to Harold and Myra’s bedroom stood ajar. It was dark inside but Pup could make out a humped shape, a down quilt tucked round it, on the far side of the double bed. He went softly over to the bed, expecting to see Myra, and saw his father lying there, fast asleep.

Dolly was rattling at the bathroom door. Harold didn’t stir. Pup went back upstairs, got a piece of wire and poked it through the keyhole on the bathroom door until the key tumbled out. He could see the key under the door and, inserting his wire, hooked it through.

Still the door would not open more than an inch or two. Something was pushing against it. Pup pushed too and the door opened enough to admit him and then Dolly and he saw that it was Myra, whose head and shoulders had prevented the door yielding.

She was lying on the floor, wearing only the top half of a pair of green nylon pajamas. Near her, on the marbled tiles, lay a small pool of cloudy water and a big tube thing with a nozzle on one end and a bulb on the other. Her face was white and stiff as wax and when Dolly, trembling, shaking, and gasping, remembering some ancient recommendation of Mrs. Collins’s, unhooked the wall mirror and held it to her lips, there was no mist of breath on the glass.

“She’s dead,” Dolly whispered.

“She can’t be dead! There’s no blood, there’s nothing.”

Her eyes met his and hers were full of wonder, of a deep, almost incredulous admiration. “Of course she’s dead,” Dolly said. “Of course she is.” She drew in her breath in a sobbing way. “I’d better go and wake Dad.”

“I’ll do that,” said Pup.

Dolly picked up the tube thing and dropped it in the basin. In lifting Myra’s pajama trousers she uncovered what lay beneath them, a cardboard box labeled: Higginson’s Syringe. Something prompted her to cover Myra’s body with a bath towel. She mopped up the pool of water and then she stood, silent and trembling, looking down at the dead, mummy-swathed thing on the floor at her feet.

13

T
he he doctor at the inquest said Myra had been ten weeks pregnant. She had tried to syringe out the uterus with a solution of water and shampoo and had continued pumping after the liquid was used up and there was only air left in the syringe. This had caused a bubble in her bloodstream, an air embolus, which, when it reached her brain, had killed her. She would have felt nothing, known nothing, simply collapsed and died.

Pup, sitting with Harold, thought that it was not true she had felt nothing. He remembered that cry. It seemed strange to him that a woman could damage her brain and kill herself merely by introducing water and air into her womb, although the doctor said this was not uncommon among women trying to procure abortion. To Pup, it still seemed nearly incomprehensible that in big, vigorous, energetic Myra, life had hung so precariously. It was as if she had been struck down, not by a little bubble of air in her blood, but by some external force that took no account of strength and vitality and love of life.

Dolly did not attend the inquest or the cremation. She had always avoided as much as she could public places and gatherings of people. The funeral was at Golders Green Crematorium, where Edith’s had been. George and Yvonne Colefax came and a cousin of Myra’s who had been a witness at her marriage to Harold. Apart from Pup and Harold himself, there was no one else in the crematorium chapel but a tall, good-looking man with graying black hair who walked with an easy grace. He slipped in and sat at the back while they were struggling through the Crimmon Version of the Twenty-third Psalm. George Colefax knew who he was and nodded to him. It was George Colefax who had rung him up and told him Myra was dead. By the time they were standing outside looking at the flowers, the man had disappeared.

Harold went home in the black funeral car he and Pup had come in but Pup accepted a lift from the Colefaxes. George’s car was a large silvery-white Mercedes-Benz. He was going to drop Yvonne off at a friend’s house in Muswell Hill, and since Pup also had a friend to visit in Muswell Hill, that would suit him too. George drove in grim silence. Yvonne sat beside him, crying quietly for Myra. She was dressed in a suit of very fine black wool and a ruffled blouse of black and white crêpe de Chine and on her thistledown hair she wore a tiny black hat with a veil. Pup, sitting in the back, wished he could still see her legs. Yvonne’s legs and slender feet were miracles of sculpting in black gossamer stockings and black patent court shoes. She cried softly, sometimes saying what a fool she was to cry but she had been so fond of Myra, it wasn’t as if she had all that many friends. George kept silent, his shoulders hunching just a bit more. The tears did nothing to Yvonne’s Arthur Rackham fairy face but trembled on it like drops of dew. Pup hoped he and she might be allowed to leave the car together but Queen’s Avenue was reached before Cranmore Way and he was obliged to get out, thanking them politely for the lift.

Without Myra the house was quiet and strange. It was an altered house, new and clean, and the cheap new furniture had a pathetic look. Once she had it to herself again and Harold and Pup were back at work, Dolly began moving things downstairs. She brought down her sewing machine and put it back in the living room that had been Myra’s pride. She brought down the chest of remnants and the box of patterns and the ballet girl doll. The other doll, the Myra one, its body ravaged by Pup’s dagger, she had removed from the temple some time in the small hours of that dreadful night. When she looked at it next day, her feelings had been strange ones—awe, wonder, guilt, remorse, triumph.

That same day she had destroyed the doll. No fireplace in the Yearman home had been used since Harold’s mother died but the fireplaces were still there. Dolly lit a fire in the one in the room that had been hers and Pup’s living room. Smoke billowed out and filled the top floor, unable to escape properly up the clogged chimney, but at last, set among Dolly’s firelighters and screws of newspaper and bits of wood, the Myra doll was consumed. She opened all the windows to cleanse the place of smoke.

It was with a feeling of relief, almost of triumph, that she moved back into her old bedroom and moved Pup’s things back into his. That evening they all ate together in the kitchen once more: tinned spaghetti, corned beef, granary rolls, St. Ivel cheese spread, defrosted chocolate éclairs. If Harold noticed this reversion to the old ways, if he was aware of an end having come to the reign of stuffed peppers and moussaka and eggs Florentine, he gave no sign of it. He read with his book propped up against the cruet, and when he had finished, he shuffled off to the breakfast room. Dolly had asked him if he would like her to clear it up a bit, do something about all those pots of paint, but Harold said no, to keep it just as Myra had left it.

Ron and Eileen Ridge, who had been on holiday in Spain at the time of Myra’s death and funeral, paid a visit of condolence.

“I did it,” said Harold. “I killed her.”

Ron was embarrassed. “Don’t say that.”

Harold spoke with lugubrious pride. “I do say it. But for me she’d be alive today. We men have a lot to answer for in this world.”

“True enough,” said Ron.

Harold showed them the breakfast room, the gateleg table still covered with a dust sheet, the paintpots still standing on newspapers, Myra’s brushes in a glass jar.

“How touching! It makes me want to cry.”

“It’s the least I can do, Eileen,” said Harold, “seeing it was me killed her.”

“He’s no right to say that,” Dolly said to Pup, and then she said what he had been dreading to hear from her: “It was you killed her.” Pup held the living-room door open for Dolly and let her pass in ahead of him and then closed it firmly. He thought his face must have gone white, it felt very stiff and cold. Dolly had flushed. The nevus was a dark, sore-looking purple.

“You must not say that.”

“Why not? You made holy water, you said the words, you stabbed the doll with your dagger and she died. Half an hour later she was dead. You stabbed the doll in the stomach and it was that part of her killed her.”

“Dolly,” he said, “it was a coincidence. Myra killed herself.

She caused her own death by doing a mad thing to herself with that syringe. I told you what the doctor said.”

“Yes, and you told me you couldn’t believe a bubble of air like that could kill anyone. You know it couldn’t. It was your magic killed her, you killed her. And why not? You’ve studied, you’ve got the power, I think you could do anything. You’re as good as that Mrs. Fitter. You’re equal to her, you’re in the same class as her and she’s famous. You can be famous now. Isn’t that what you want?”

There were a good many statements among what Dolly had just said whose accuracy Pup doubted. As for Mrs. Fitter—he was on the point of telling her the truth about Suzanne’s father but he thought better of it. Dolly had been strange since Myra’s death, perhaps since before Myra’s death, intense, preoccupied, sometimes seeming to listen or stare as a cat may do, erecting its fur at nothing. If Pup had pinned himself down to it, had really wanted to think of it, he would have said there was something disturbed about her and he might have gone even further. But he did not want to think about it. He did not want to think about Myra’s death, about Dolly’s loss of balance or about anything that was in any way connected with magic, the occult, the supernatural, ectoplasm, rituals, good and bad spirits, incense, archangels, Crowley, or any of it.

What he wanted was to go upstairs and dismantle the temple. Put the dagger, the wand, the cup and the pentacle in the plastic bag for Haringey Council to take away, give the golden robe to Oxfam, sell the books down the Archway Road and paint over the black walls with some of Myra’s “Sunbeach.” Walking home from work, he decided to do this or some of this, once he had had his supper. But as soon as he saw Dolly, as soon as she had come up to him and put up her face for his kiss, he knew that, of course, he couldn’t do it. Get rid of the temple, deny his powers, his commitment, and then what would become of the alibi he had used so successfully last night in order to see Philippa? He had probably gone too far already in refusing to accept responsibility for Myra’s death. Unless he could invent something else. Chess? Car maintenance classes? Cinema club? She knew he was interested in none of those things. She knew what interested him, what
had
interested him. Pup nearly groaned aloud.