The Killing Doll (6 page)

“Marriage isn’t all roses,” said Mrs. Brewer. “You’ve got your hubby and now you’re paying the price.”

“For Christ’s sake, Mother, there’s no pleasing you.”

“Got married to please me, did you? You can tell your little bitch of a stepdaughter if she lays a finger on my Gingie, I’ll have the RSPCA on her.”

Myra had married principally to have a home of her own. She saw a future in which she gave little dinner parties or even quite large cocktail parties, in which the cavernous drawing room was furnished dashingly with stripped pine and Korean cane-work, corner units and glass tables with upholstered surrounds. That was the way she imagined the interior of the house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, home of her dentist employer and his wife. It was a little dream of hers one day to invite George and Yvonne Colefax to Manningtree Grove, to a home she need not be ashamed of.

Already she had livened the place up with some of her own pieces from West Hampstead, the Athena Art Van Goghs, the gold chrome spotlights, the reproduction wine table. Her plastic apron had on it a map of the London tube system. If Peter and Doreen didn’t want a bathroom of their own, she might as well spend the money having a really super Wrighton kitchen put in here. She called to her husband.

He came into the kitchen, still holding the open copy of
Her Grace of Amalfi
by Grenville West, which was providing him with a little light relief from a life of the Princess Frederick, mother of the Kaiser. Myra put a tube-map dishcloth into his hands. Before his second marriage and during his first he had never dried dishes but had rinsed cups and plates under the tap and left them to drain. Plates had never got sticky because he had lived contentedly off Cornish pasties and Scotch eggs and apples and tomatoes and tubs of ice cream, foodstuffs which scarcely need plates at all.

Dolly, in her window, watched them go off down the road for a drink in The Woman in White or perhaps to bingo. Harold had never played bingo before, but Myra had and Mrs. Brewer had frequently. Pup was in the temple, performing a Lesser Pentagram ritual as an opening for a piece of practical work. He had told Dolly nothing of what this practical work might be but she guessed it was something to do with the changes he was bringing into being at Hodge and Yearman. Already he had had the sign over the shop altered to “Yearman and Hodge,” the Hodge part in very small letters. The name of the company had been changed, he told Dolly, but she didn’t follow that, she wasn’t interested.

She looked down on Myra, who was dressed as usual in her favorite green, the emerald blouse tonight with all the gold chains, black cotton satin trousers, and black patent sandals. Dolly had very good taste herself, she had a fine color sense, and she knew that people with Myra’s coloring should never wear bright greens and blues but rather shades of stone and brown or even pink or the red of their hair. It exasperated her, but her face, to any passer-by looking up, gave no sign of this. Long ago she had learned to control its natural movements so that an observer’s attention might not be drawn to it. Like Diane de Poitiers—her father might have told her—she never smiled and never frowned. She was holding the talisman so tightly in her hand that the rather sharp-sided heptagon made a red imprint on the palm. From the other side of the wall, Pup’s low voice could be heard maintaining a low regular chant. He was invoking archangels. Dolly refilled her wine glass, stood up against the wall with her ear to it and listened to Pup.

“Ateh malkuth ve-geburah ve-gedulah le-olam…”

He was conjuring strength for himself to make something come to pass. What seemed irrelevant. Was there a limit to what could be accomplished? She put up her hand and touched the surface of the nevus …

“Before me, Raphael,
Behind me, Gabriel,
On my right hand, Michael,
On my left hand, Uriel …”

The walls were thin in these big houses.

Carrying the glass of wine, she walked back to the window. There were blobs and streaks of orange light on the walls and ceiling now and the sky was parrot-colored, scarlet and gray, with sunset. Up here Dolly felt herself cut off on a limb of loneliness. The room was stuffy and close and Pup’s voice droned behind the wall. She would have liked to break things, smash a window and shout out. Down in the street, trotting fast towards Hornsey Rise, came Miss Finlay, moving as she had done that evening in the winter, as if hastening away, without actually running, from some peril behind. Dolly had heard no more about the velvet skirt, wanted none of Miss Finlay, yet as she saw her scurrying along, going about her business whatever it might be, she felt a pang of resentment, of jealousy almost—though jealousy of
what?
—that Miss Finlay had no more desire to have her as a friend than she had to know Miss Finlay better.

Had she perhaps said something to offend her? Dolly thought back. Their conversation relayed itself to her from the whiff of lemon verbena to the parting at the gate. And then, her father and Myra in the kitchen … She had told Miss Finlay about Pup’s magic, mentioned it and his powers, and Miss Finlay had said something silly, something about sticking pins in wax images. It had seemed silly at the time. Dolly recalled it in detail. Circumstances alter cases and time alters them.

She had no wax. She would hardly have known how to handle it if she had. There were materials in the room she knew how to handle. She searched through the old fiber trunk, the cardboard crate in which she kept remnants and cut-offs of material. She went into her bedroom and fetched a pair of very light-colored tights that had a run in them. It was going to be a longer job than she had thought at first. For one thing she had never done anything like this before. She would need kapok and that meant going to the shops tomorrow. Taking a sip of her wine, she outlined a shape on the tights with French chalk, and then she began cutting.

When Pup came home on the following evening she showed him the doll. It was about fifteen inches high, a rag doll with knitted nylon skin and rust-colored wool hair and a face embroidered in lipstick red and rouge pink and eyeshadow green. The doll’s chest was the fattest and most prominent part of it. It wore a bright green blouse and a navy, green and white check skirt and round its neck and over the bulging chest Dolly had hung gold chains. In the ironmongers in Muswell Hill she had found some plumber’s chain, the sophisticated sort that is composed of tiny balls joined by links, the whole being of gilt rather than silver metal.

Pup laughed. “Our wicked stepmother,” he said.

“You can see it’s her, can’t you?”

“It’s exactly like.” He gave the doll back. “What did you make it for?”

Dolly told him. He looked rather grave.

“I do white magic.”

Even implied reproof made Dolly angry, even when it came from him. Especially when it came from him.

“You sold your soul to the devil!”

“Come on,” said Pup. “I was a kid.”

He walked out of the room and went into the temple and closed the door. There, having put on the orange robe, he began to perform one of the rites of the Pentagram, a Lesser Banishing ritual. It was of a kind specially evolved for the banishing of disturbing or obsessing ideas. Pup had been more and more afflicted with these lately and they had nothing to do with Myra or effigies of Myra.

Tears had come into Dolly’s eyes. She clenched her fists. After a moment or two she got her pin box and stuck pins all over the doll, into its legs, its body, its bosom, and its embroidered face. It had taken her all day to make, all last evening and all day, about ten hours’ work. She picked it up and hurled it against the wall.

6

A
postcard came for Diarmit after Conal Moore had been gone for about three months. The picture on it was of the Cliffs of Moher in the west of Ireland. Conal had printed Diarmit’s name and the address. He knew who it was from only because one of the other tenants picked up the card and said, “It’s from Conal,” though whether she had said it to him, Diarmit could not be sure, certainly she did not look at him when she spoke, she might merely have been thinking aloud.

What Conal said on the card, Diarmit never found out. Perhaps something about paying the rent, for next day the landlord spoke to him and said Mr. Moore owed a month’s rent. This time Diarmit was in no doubt that he was being addressed, though he did not feel, so vague and fidgety did the landlord seem, that he was being spoken to as a real, solid, flesh-and-blood person but rather as a guessed-at presence or a shape just discerned at the end of a dark room. He paid the back rent and some rent in advance out of his accumulated Social Security. He had plenty of money; there was nothing to spend it on.

Conal’s postcard joined the note in his pocket. It puzzled Diarmit terribly as to what Conal meant by offering him that butcher’s job. It had been a firm offer, surely, but it had all been done by word of mouth, and now Diarmit could not positively remember if the name Budgen’s had actually been mentioned by Conal. Perhaps Mary had said Budgen’s as people say Hoover when they mean a vacuum cleaner. It might have been some other supermarket—Tesco, Finefare, Sainsbury’s, Spar, International, Safeway. Diarmit knew the names so well because he had taken to walking about all over north London looking for the supermarket where the job was waiting for him. It bothered him that they might have been angry because he had never turned up for it. He went into supermarkets in Holloway, Crouch End, Muswell Hill and Wood Green, wondering which it could have been but never actually asking, hoping that somehow, when he came to the right place, he would know.

He was an unobtrusive person, neither tall nor short, with darkish brown, dusty-looking hair, features that might have been roughly molded from putty with careless fingers, gray puzzled eyes. He had brought with him all the clothes he possessed: Hong Kong—made jeans and shirts, a thick gray duffel coat, a quilted nylon jacket. In a second-hand shop in the Archway Road he had bought himself a pair of dark wine-red cord trousers and he wore these most of the time with a dark red shirt which did not show the dirt. He carried the olive-green bag with Harrods printed on it in gold about with him in his other pocket (the pocket which did not contain the card and the note) in case he bought anything.

After he had been, for the third or fourth time, into Sainsbury’s at Muswell Hill, looking in vain for a butchery department, as if it might be hidden in some corner of the store he had not yet penetrated, behind the cigarette kiosk, for instance, or in the corner between the vegetables and the turkeys, he crossed the road and went into the big ironmongers where Pup had bought his magic knife and Dolly her gold chains. There he selected, as nearly as was possible in a domestic hardware store, the implements of a butcher’s trade: a steel cleaver for chopping and two long knives. The girl on the check-out was talking to a friend of hers and she did not look at Diarmit or speak to him except to say, “Seventeen pounds, forty-five.”

From Woodside Road he walked all the way back along the old railway line, carrying the knives in the Harrods bag. It was warm and sunny and there were red and black butterflies on the purple spires of buddleia between Highgate and the old Mount Pleasant Green station. Being in possession of the tools of his trade made Diarmit feel a little better. He would be ready now if the job were to present itself. How this might be he hardly knew, though he had vague ideas of someone coming to the door in Mount Pleasant Gardens and asking for him or of Conal coming back.

Back in the house, he used the pay phone for the first time. To do this was a tremendous effort for him, an act of will comparable in anyone else to braving naked an icy river or confronting a savage dog, for by now he had gone a long way along the road towards a split-off from reality. It was as if one of those knives, grasped and held poised, was waiting to strike and cleave a great chasm between himself—whatever “himself” might be, for that was already fast becoming lost—and the natural, normal, real world where others lived their natural, normal, real lives. But he used the phone. He phoned his sister Kathleen in Kilburn, having held her number in his memory for many months. As the bell rang he trembled, he trembled as the pips sounded, for suppose he should put his money in and speak but Kathleen not hear him?

His five-pence piece went into the slot and he spoke on a drawn breath.

“It’s Diarmit, it’s your brother, Kathleen. I’m here, not far from you, at Conal Moore’s.”

A man’s voice. He hadn’t seen her for years and she had married since he had seen her. “She’s got a lot of brothers.”

“She has. I’m Diarmit, I’m the youngest. Now I don’t recall your name, what would your name be?” Diarmit went on desperately because there was no answer, “Are you there? Will Kathleen be there?”

“She’s at work.”

“She’s lucky, then, lucky to have work.” Diarmit experimented with a pleasant laugh. “I could do with work myself. When do you expect her back now? This is her brother, you see. This is her little brother Diarmit. Where is she now? Could I ring her at her work?”

“She’ll be home half-five.”

The phone went down. At least he had heard his voice, Diarmit thought, he had known who he was. And Kathleen really lived there, she lived in Kilburn, at where that number was, it was all right, it was true and real. Instead of going back into his room, he left the house again with the note and card in his pocket and the Harrods bag in his hand and went down the steps that had been cut out of the embankment to the old station. The rosebay willow herb was in bloom and the white campion. There were pink and white and yellow weeds flowering among the green grass and the rusty cans and the blown feathers. It was warm and hazy, it smelt of cow parsley and diesel fumes. Diarmit walked along the edge of the platform and jumped down and walked on the grassy bed where the track had been.

A woman was coming along with a white Pyrenean mountain dog on a lead. As big and incongruous as a polar bear it looked to Diarmit. He spoke to the woman courteously.

“Good afternoon. A lovely afternoon.”

She made no acknowledgment of this. Her eyes were fixed rigidly ahead. He spoke again, “Lovely sunshine …” and this time, as if to confirm that she could neither see nor hear him, she bent down and whispered something to the dog, fondling its head. He stood still, watching her go. She tripped along fast, hauling the dog behind her up the steps. Diarmit walked along the old railway line, swinging the Harrods bag, singing as he went like Bottom the Weaver who sang so that others might know he was not afraid. Diarmit would have liked to sing Irish songs but there were none he could remember, so he sang “God Save the Queen,” the only verse he knew, over and over, that others might know he was not afraid and for himself too, to know that the sound came from something and that that something was himself.