The Killing Doll (27 page)

Out of the swing doors at the entrance came Ashley Clare. Dolly was surprised. He was going to work, she was sure of that; so soon after his illness he was back at work and walking briskly down the hill towards the station. He wore a coat of white or natural-colored sheepskin, full-length and belted, a gray fur hat, and around his mouth and nose a scarf was tied just as she had tied hers. She followed him for a little way, then turned back and made for the bus stop at Jack Straw’s. It seemed that he had made a complete recovery, was more fully restored to health than she had expected. She felt depressed and afraid. It was as if she was having to learn all over again that the magic had failed.

Because the sun had come up and the sky was blue, she walked home from Highgate along the old railway line. Until she walked there, it had been a white avenue of virgin snow, undisturbed, unprinted. Gingie, stalking hungry birds, showed up on the snow like a spoonful of marmalade on a white plate, and from the Mistley tunnel, feathers, discolored gray, still blew out from the inexhaustible mattress. Dolly had to go up the steps. She couldn’t manage the slippery, snow-covered embankment.

As she let herself into the house she fancied she heard a woman’s voice, and not Myra’s or Edith’s. The breakfast room door had been open when she went out but now it was shut. Eileen Ridge, she thought, and she seemed to know what she was about to hear.

“It’s for the companionship, isn’t it?” Edith’s voice said.

“You could see that coming a mile off, to be frank,” said Myra. “You could see that coming from the day of poor Ronald’s funeral.”

“She could do worse when all’s said and done,” said Edith.

Dolly hesitated and then opened the door. Myra’s paints and brushes and dust sheets were gone. The two of them were sitting at the gate-leg table, reading together some sheets of manuscript.

The woman was Wendy Collins and she was wearing the trouser suit Dolly had made her.

“Here’s Dolly at last,” she said. “We can tell her our news, Harry.”

Dolly minded much less than she had about Myra. What it would mean for the future did not trouble her.

“If there’s anything could put Doreen’s nose out of joint, this will,” Myra said and yet she was wrong. It had hardly touched her.

If Pup would be what he had once been, if Yvonne would come back and be her friend, nothing else was important. If that would happen she even felt Edith and Myra might go away and not come back. As she put the wine that she had bought into the fridge, she thought she saw the dog-faced god looking in through the window at her, but she stared hard and bravely at him and he vanished, he melted away with the snow and the icicles that the sun was now melting.

Suppose she were to try and do magic herself? In the past, she had felt too humble to attempt it. It had been Pup’s province, the province of the male magus. Yet women could become adepts as well as men. If you believed, surely, if you had faith, and did all the right things, drew the circles and the pentagrams correctly, made the holy water, learned the words without mistakes … And there was something psychic about her, something of the invisible world. Her ghosts, raised by Mrs. Fitter, had stayed with her and not departed as those others had. The god she picked out had come and still remained, waiting like a genie. There was more affinity with the occult in her than there was in Pup, the geomancer.

The books would instruct her as they had instructed him. She could work in the temple, wear the robe and use the elemental weapons. She went up the stairs. At about lunchtime Harold had gone out and Wendy with him and they had not come back. The phone had not rung once all day. It was four in the afternoon, not dark yet, not quite dusk, but on the point of twilight, the sky and air dark blue, lights coming on everywhere, and the streets glistening with yellow light that gleamed on the half-melted snow. A bluish glimmer, reflected off the snow, filled the house.

At the foot of the top flight she switched a light on. It seemed to fill a little space and leave dark corners everywhere. Yet she was alone, there were no voices whispering and no half-glimpsed shapes. She crossed the landing and opened the temple door. A feeling of faintness came over her and she gasped, for the temple was gone and as if it had never been.

It was just a shabby little back bedroom. The walls were white, or whitish, and patchy, the floor was bare, and in the middle of the floor stood a rickety bamboo card table. The whole room rocked as she looked at it. She steadied herself, holding on to the doorknob, a singing in her head. For a moment she had a dreadful thought that she had imagined it all, the years of its existence and everything that had happened and been made to happen in it. Then she switched the light on.

The uncurtained window became a blue rectangle, patterned with a trellis of black branches. She saw what the bamboo table was. Once it had been the altar on which the elemental weapons had lain. Now the weapons were gone and the robe was gone from behind the door and the
tattwas
had disappeared from the walls. But its existence had not been in her imagination only. The black could still be seen through the rough whitewashing of the walls. There was a burn mark still on the floorboards where the wax image had caught fire in the bowl.

Pup had done it. He had meant what he said. On that very night when he had told her magic was nonsense, he had done it, on other nights too perhaps, when she thought he was out or asleep. He had fetched Myra’s paints from the breakfast room and painted over the black of the walls. He had stripped the cloth covering from the altar and taken away the weapons to destroy them. Suddenly she remembered the books. What had he done with the books?

She ran from room to room, looking for them. They were nowhere on this top attic floor. She went down to his bedroom and searched it. Without qualms, without caring for his privacy, she threw open cupboard doors, rifled drawers, looked under the bed, even under the mattress.

They were nowhere. They were not in the house. He had burned them or sold them. She trailed away, down to the kitchen, down to her wine. She opened the bottle, poured the first glassful, with hands that shook. What use would they have been anyway? What use was anything with the temple itself gone?

She understood now that the days of magic and all that magic could do were over.

22

P
up was very gentle with her and very kind. He came home every evening, though sometimes very late. She made a point of not asking him where he had been; she told herself that perhaps he still had to go to the Golden Dawn to complete a course or some such thing. She hardly saw Harold, and after that day when she had surprised them together, she never saw Wendy. Once she happened to overhear Mrs. Collins say: “Poor Dolly’s gone downhill a lot, hasn’t she? Miss Finlay saw her out shopping the other day talking to herself.”

And Wendy who was out in the hall with her laughed. “The first sign of insanity, they used to say.”

It was Pup who told her Wendy and their father intended to live in one of the flats over the new shop.

“Then there’ll just be you and me here?”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

A house of their own, a house to themselves … “You could have one of the bigger rooms for a temple. You could start all over again.”

“No, I couldn’t, dear. I shall never start it again, I told you. It’s nonsense, Dolly, ask any rational person.”

She knew no rational people, she knew no one. “Did you burn the books?”

“I sold the lot for a pound to a dealer on Highgate Hill.”

“What are people going to think?” she heard Edith whisper to Myra over by the sewing machine. “I feel quite awkward about it.”

“What are people going to think of you?” Dolly said. “All those Golden Dawn people?” She brought the name out with a bitter edge. “What’s Yvonne going to think?”

“I shan’t tell people,” he said lightly. “Why should I?”

Yvonne didn’t know, then. Yvonne still waited, expecting Dolly—or Pup through Dolly—to get her husband back.

“Hope deferred,” said Edith sententiously, “maketh the heart sick.”

Yvonne’s heart was sick and sore and therefore she kept away from Dolly, hating her for her failure. Dolly came to a decision. The doll she would keep in reserve but the dungarees should be sent to Yvonne by the means she herself had suggested. She bought dark green tissue paper and wrapping paper patterned all over with ivy leaves and wrapped up the dungarees and asked Pup to take them to Shelley Drive.

“If you’re up that way,” she said, kissing him goodbye.

“I expect I shall be,” he said.

It was very late when he got home that night but Dolly was still up, drinking Yugoslav Riesling. He brought her a note from Yvonne. “Dolly,” it began, the name written diagonally across the top and underlined, “the dungarees are super, a perfect fit, and I am thrilled. Thank you so much. You must let me know what I owe you, at least for the material. Yours, Yvonne.”

Nothing about when she would see her, nothing about getting in touch. That bit about paying for the material hurt. Dolly thought Yvonne had meant it to hurt. Had she mentioned payment only to remind Dolly of that much greater service she had offered to pay for but which had never been performed? But what most pained Dolly was the way the letter opened and the way it ended, cold as ice and standoffish, no “dear” and “love” this time.

Once more there clung to Pup the scent of Ivoire. Of course, she knew he had been up to Yvonne’s, she had asked him to go there, of course he had very likely shaken hands with Yvonne, and yet her imagination and her reasoning told her that secretly Pup and Yvonne had become friends. Lonely without her husband, Yvonne had turned to Pup and unless George went back to her …

“To be perfectly honest, Edith,” Myra whispered, using the same phrases she had once used to Dolly in life, “to be perfectly honest, I can’t say it doesn’t look as if they’ve got a serious thing going because, frankly, it does.”

Back in the summer, when the subject had first been raised, Dolly had wanted the world rid of Ashley Clare for Yvonne’s sake. Now she wanted it for her own. Remembering the heart murmur Pup said he had, she worked in quite a precise and scientific way on the doll next morning, plunging not pins but two long tapestry needles into the region where its heart might be supposed to be. It seemed impossible to her that such vehemence of will and such concentrated malice could be expended without result, yet she had achieved nothing. Because she dared not ask Pup and could not ask Yvonne, she went over to Arrowsmith Court herself on the bus and waited outside for hours and in vain. It was only on her third visit that she saw Ashley Clare. At 9:00 in the evening he came out of the flats and got into George Colefax’s Mercedes.

On the way back, perhaps because a woman sitting behind her mentioned to her companion that she lived in Camden Town, Dolly remembered those minutes on the platform when she had put up her hands and been prepared to push a woman over the edge and out of life.

“I used to wear that emerald shade a lot,” said Myra, coming to sit beside her while Edith squeezed up on the edge of the seat.

“It’s a difficult color to match and a difficult color to wear,” Edith said.

Dolly swatted them away but they were waiting for her at the bus stop. “You don’t know everything,” she said to them. “You said Pup was doing magic when he wasn’t, he was breaking up the temple.” She shouted out, “You said Ashley Clare would die!”

A man coming down the hill said, “Here, steady on, love. Real little piss artist you are.”

Under the light he saw her face, her cheek, and she saw him look away embarrassed. He thought she was drunk. The funny thing was it was the first evening she could remember when she hadn’t had a drink. Her body craved it. She went up the steps on to the Archway bridge and Hornsey Lane. Standing on the bridge, close by one of the yellow-painted, concrete lamp standards, Anubis pointed his dog snout at the smoky purple sky. She looked away and looked again and he was gone, melted into the ironwork. In Manningtree Grove she met Miss Finlay, scuttling home from the Adonai Spiritists, but she did not acknowledge Miss Finlay’s timid greeting. She passed on, her head averted, scolding Myra who kept touching her and whispering. The wine, after the first tumblerful, drove Myra and Edith temporarily away.

“I’m leaving,” the policewoman said. “I’m moving out.” He saw her give him a cunning look, seeing how he would take it. “I’ve come up to say goodbye.”

He wondered whether to believe her. You could never really trust those people.

“I’m moving to St. Alban’s,” she said. “I’ve got a flat there.”

An unlikely story. “Who’ll be moving in then?”

She said she didn’t know. She was going in an hour or so and she had all this stuff left over, tins of food and jam and some potatoes, scouring powder and washing-up liquid, and she wondered if he’d like to have it. It seemed a pity to throw it away.

“You can leave it with me,” he said and he smiled, pulling the wool over her eyes. They still thought they could drug him. If you looked closely at those tins you’d see minute pin holes they’d pushed the hypodermic through. The potatoes too. They must think him daft if they reckoned on him eating that jam.

“Well, I’ll say goodbye then, Diarmit.”

That angered him and told him a lot. “My name’s Conal Moore, I’ll thank you to call me by my name.”

She shrugged. “Goodbye.”

After she had gone and it got dark he took the tins and the potatoes and the jam across the street to the green and divided them among the three litter bins. Someone had been up and searched the room in his absence, he was sure of it. The Harrods bag containing the knives was lying a little further from the bed than it had been. He could smell that girl in the room. Cautiously he sniffed the scouring powder, the washing-up liquid, then the scouring powder again. It made him sneeze. He sneezed twenty times or more and his nose started to run. They were trying to poison him now. He opened the window and put his head out into the frosty February night.

After a time his head cleared a little and he began to understand what they were doing. They had tried to make him say he was Diarmit Bawne, for Diarmit Bawne was a witness and could tell the whole truth about Conal Moore. Hadn’t he helped the police before? That responsible hard-working citizen had helped the police before, had them here in Conal’s room, talked to them, asked them to keep in touch. They’d tried that on with persuasion and drugs, sending that woman to disarm him, but they had failed. No one should make him say he was who he was not. But he would have to get out of here, he was in grave danger here.