The Killing Doll (25 page)

“I’d like you to call me Pup, please,” said Pup, getting out of bed. “And I’ve never asked anyone that before.” He began putting his clothes on. “But you’d better forget that god and guru stuff, it never was and it never will be. It’s all in Dolly’s head. Whatever she says, there’s nothing I can do to split up George and this Ashley chap. Why bother anyway? You don’t need George now.”

She looked at him doubtfully and then she smiled.

George had not spent a night in his own home for a fortnight. Ashley Clare was a heavy smoker and the virus had affected his chest. Yvonne told Dolly this on the phone when she made an excuse for not coming to Manningtree Grove as she had promised. He lay in bed, too weak to move, his temperature rising each evening so that the doctor talked of having him in hospital for tests. All the time he was not at his dental practice, George was at his bedside.

Dolly was not surprised but still she felt a kind of awe. This had been done by Pup, who had not even known he was doing it. Pup had conjured up the god and the god had consumed Ashley Clare in his fire. His was not to be a quick death like Myra’s but long drawn out, yet ultimately he would die. Just as they had said Myra had died of an air embolus so they would say his death was due to heart failure or an allergy to antibiotics. Only she would ever know Pup had brought it about by magic.

She was impatient for news but Yvonne no longer came or even rang up. Dolly knew perfectly well why this was. It was because she was tired of waiting. She had no real faith in Dolly or Pup; perhaps she even thought Dolly had never mentioned the matter to Pup and had done nothing about it. Instead of coming back to her, she saw that George was more devoted to Ashley Clare than ever.

Well, it was only a matter of time. Dolly missed Yvonne but she could understand how Yvonne felt, disillusioned, bitter perhaps. Once Ashley Clare was dead, she would come back, she would be grateful. George would return to her and the two of them with her and Pup would become eternal fast friends. She thought of them all going out together, in the Porsche perhaps or in George’s Mercedes. They would go to restaurants in Hampstead. People would take her and Pup for husband and wife. Dolly went through Edith’s things and found her wedding ring. It fitted the third finger of her left hand as neatly as it had fitted her mother’s.

Seeing the ring, Edith said to Myra, “I’m glad to see her wearing that. It was hurtful to me her not wearing my ring. I always wore my mother’s wedding ring, on my right hand of course.”

Dolly switched the ring over to her right hand. She sat at the sewing machine, stitching the long seams in the green cord dungarees she was making for Yvonne. Yvonne hadn’t asked for them. She was making them on spec, for a surprise, but she knew Yvonne would be pleased. The two voices were whispering over in the corner by the remnants box, whisper, whisper, they had become close friends. They never spoke directly to Dolly any more.

“Candidly, Edith, no one in their senses would actually take Doreen for your son’s wife.”

“No, dear, I know.”

“That disfigurement of hers really puts that kind of thing out of court, if I may be honest.”

Dolly treadled furiously, trying to silence them with the sound of the machine. It was raining, dark outside at 4:30 as the winter solstice approached. The seam came to an end and she had to stop. Whisper, whisper. How was it they could read her thoughts? And read, too, the thoughts she had but never expressed on the exposed surfaces of her mind?

Myra said confidingly, “Peter’s very clever, of course, I grant you that. It’s not impossible he could do something for her.”

“We did everything in our power. We took her to specialists, they all shook their heads, they all said there was nothing to be done.”

“Not by medical science maybe, that’s a different thing altogether. Why doesn’t she ask him to use his powers to take away that birthmark?”

Dolly jumped up. She threw a cotton reel at them and they vanished. It had made her tremble a little, what Myra had said. She went out to the kitchen to fetch her frascati from the fridge. Nothing happened when she tried to switch the light on; the bulb had gone. The kitchen was dim, lit only by the blue gas pilot on top of the oven.

He was standing between the back door and the fridge, tall and glistening, his crested headdress reaching to the ceiling, his furred snout twitching and his muzzle bared in a snarl. Lord of the Cemetery, Anubis, jackal scavenger, bearing in his hands the caduceus and the palms. Dolly screamed. There was no one to hear her. She screamed and slammed the door on him and fled back to the living room where she lay screaming and beating the floor with her fists.

The footsteps sounded heavily above them, pacing up and down. It was unpleasant, inescapable, it made the room vibrate.

“It’s worrying me,” Andrea said. “I’m worried sick.”

“You’ll have to move,” Pup said. “What else can you do? You’ve been up and asked him to stop and I’ve been up. I’ll do anything you want but I don’t know what to suggest.”

Andrea looked at him. They were sitting on her neat bed eating eggs Benedict, which she had gone to infinite trouble to make for him.

“There is one thing you could do. Come with me to a doctor and tell him we think the boy upstairs is having a—well, a mental breakdown, and ask him to do something. He ought to be in a mental hospital, Peter, he ought to be having treatment.”

“I don’t think I could do that,” Pup said slowly. He told himself that he had trouble enough of that kind at home without looking for it outside. “It’s nothing to do with me.”

   “Who is it to do with, then? He’s all on his own, he doesn’t seem to have any family. I said mental breakdown but it’s more than that, he’s not sane, I’m sure of it, he’s crazy. He thinks if he goes out in the daytime, workmen are going to come and demolish the house, he told me so, he believes it. And he says his name’s Conal Moore. Three people in this house have told me Conal Moore was a big, tall, fair fellow who moved out last July twelvemonth and hasn’t been back since.”

“You want me to go with you and tell a doctor that? What doctor anyway?”

“I haven’t got a doctor here yet but you must have. You must have a GP.”

“You mean you want to have the poor guy—what do they call it—committed? You want him committed to a mental hospital?”

“It would be for his own good, Peter.”

“You go to a doctor if you must,” said Pup, “but you can count me out. If I were you, though, I’d find another place to live. It would be simpler.”

She looked at him as if she wanted to say something but did not quite dare. He raised an eyebrow but the moment was past and she shook her head. She took their plates and began to de-mold a
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Above them the footsteps marched wearily back and forth across the twelve-foot-square floor space.

Later, when he got home, Dolly asked him to put a new bulb in the kitchen light. He noticed she wouldn’t go out there until the new bulb was in and the light switched on. She smelled of brandy this evening, not wine. There had been some brandy in the sideboard, he remembered, left over from the days of Myra.

Charity begins at home. Before he did anything about Diarmit Bawne he must do something about his own sister. He watched her creep fearfully into the brightly light kitchen and look wide-eyed about her. Without thinking of the implications, wanting only to bring her back to normalcy, he said: “By the way, George Colefax’s friend has been taken into the Royal Free.”

“Into hospital?”

He nodded. “He’s got congestion of the lungs. He’s quite seriously ill.”

“How do you know?” she said sharply.

Which of them was she jealous of? Him or Yvonne? He lied smoothly, “I was doing a servicing job in the Suburb and I ran into Yvonne.”

Her eyes and her very slightly trembling mouth were full of suspicion. He saw her keep glancing at him. At breakfast next morning she began on the subject again.

“I don’t know anymore,” he said, an edge now to his usually gentle voice. “Only that he’s in his hospital and they’re not happy with the electrocardiograph they did. They say he has a heart murmur.”

She gave a sort of grunt, staring intently at him like one of those mothers who say they can tell their child’s deceit by the way his eyes shine. Harold came to the table in his best suit but tieless. He accepted a cup of tea and scattered dry rustling cornflakes into his bowl, though making no attempt at first to eat them. The suit hung in folds on his small, now emaciated frame.

“Not another funeral, surely?” said Pup.

Harold shook his head. “Can you let me have a loan of a tie? Mine aren’t up to much. Nothing flashy, mind.”

Pup went upstairs and brought him down three ties, a navy patterned with white daisies, a dark gray with tiny fawn and pink squares, a cream and silver stripe with a brown chevron cutting across the center. Being Pup’s, they were all of silk. Harold chose the dark gray.

“I shan’t be in the shop today. I’m going up to town.”

“Christmas shopping?” said Pup.

Harold, who had not smiled for weeks, now burst into a high-pitched cackle of laughter. The idea of him going Christmas shopping!

“I don’t know about that, I don’t know about that at all.” Mirth shook him. As if his laughter had effected some kind of catharsis or liberation, he suddenly grabbed the sugar basin, sugared his cornflakes, poured milk on them, and began voraciously to eat. Pup said no more. He could tell his father didn’t want to say where he was going or why. Probably, whatever it might be, it had something to do with the typewritten letter which had arrived for him two days before and which had thrown him, also at breakfast, into a minor excited panic.

After they had gone, Dolly phoned the Royal Free Hospital. It took her a while to find out which ward Ashley Clare was in. When they put her on to the staff nurse on duty, she said she was his sister.

“There’s no change,” the nurse said. “He’s as well as can be expected.”

Dolly had to be content with that. She tried to phone Yvonne but there was no reply. Since that evening in the kitchen she had not directly seen Anubis, not face to face, but she had glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye, the glitter of his headdress, the snakelike skin, or his dog’s face had looked at her suddenly out of a darkening recess of the room. She could bear it, she set her teeth against the fear. He would stay until his work was done, she thought, but when Ashley Clare was dead he would depart.

She finished the green cord dungarees. The idea came to her of making a doll for Yvonne, a doll to match her white and gold bedroom, to sit on her bed and conceal a nightdress under its skirts. That night she dreamed of Anubis for the first time. He was performing his function of conducting the dead along the path to the underworld or Other Side. Edith and Myra followed him and Ronald Ridge and Mrs. Brewer with Fluffy in her arms, but ahead of them all, at the god’s side, was Ashley Clare. And the path they walked along, leading into the Mistley tunnel, was the old railway line.

Pup came home at about eight in the evening. He kissed her cheek and she smelled Balmain’s Ivoire on him. She heard Myra and Edith whispering and she jumped away from Pup as if, instead of French perfume, she had smelt a foul stench. He didn’t seem to notice.

“I’ve got something interesting to tell you,” he said.

She was instantly suspicious. “What sort of something?”

“Dad’s written a book. It’s a historical novel and it’s going to be published. That’s where he was going the other day, to see these publishers. They wrote to him to say they like the book, they want him to make some changes but they like it and they want him to do a sequel. How about that? He’s going to retire and leave me a clear field.”

“Oh,” she said, thinking.

“He’s over the moon. I left him in the pub, having a drink with Eileen Ridge to celebrate.”

“So he’s happy and successful,” she said in a strange concentrated tone. “He’s got what he wanted. Everything has come right for him.”

“You could put it that way, yes.”

She was silent. He suddenly felt, without knowing why, extremely uncomfortable. She was staring at him, her eyes slightly out of alignment, so that the left one seemed to be looking at something beyond or behind him. It made him turn round and look. She had been making a doll that looked exactly like Yvonne, with beige-blonde nylon hair and dressed all in bridal white. Why? he asked himself, what for?

She said, “Pup?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Could we go up to the temple?”

He shrugged. He was tired and he had a lot to think about. The color had come up into her face, a dark ugly flush.

“You can do anything,” she said. “I know that now. You’ve got power, more than a doctor, more than anyone … So will you—will you …” Her hand went trembling up to her cheek. “Will you take this away?”

He was speechless. She held her hand there, covering the nevus.

“You could do a Pentagram ritual,” she said. “Or an invocation. You could do it by degrees, it doesn’t have to be all at once, you could …”

He shouted at her when of all times he should have been gentle. “I can’t! You know I can’t!”

She nodded, said in perfect faith, “You can do anything.”

“Dolly, I can’t. Listen to me.” He came and sat beside her, taking her by the shoulders. “I’m sorry I shouted at you, I shouldn’t have done that. I can’t take away your birthmark, do you understand? I can’t, it’s impossible.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“No, I don’t mean that. Listen to me, I’d give everything I’ve got, I’d give years of my life to take it away if I could.” He believed he was speaking the truth. “I’d do anything in the world for you but it’s not in my power to do that.”

She said slowly, heavily, “You killed Myra, you made yourself pass your driving test, you brought Dad happiness and success, you’ve got the business for your own, so why can’t you do that for me?”

“I did not do those things. They happened. Don’t you see? Myra dying was a coincidence. I passed my driving test because—well, because I can drive. Dad wrote his book himself, didn’t he? How could magic make him a writer?”