The Killing Doll

by Ruth Rendell

  Harold gave Dolly a sheepish grin.

  “Tell her our news, Hal,” said Myra.

  He did so. Dolly listened to the halting, embarrassed, rather shamefaced announcement in silence. She was going to say she didn’t believe it but that wasn’t true; she found she had no difficulty at all in believing it. Still without speaking, she went back into the hall and closed the kitchen door.

  Then, having taken a deep breath and clenched her fists, she ran upstairs to tell Pup.

  5

  The top floor,” Myra said, “would make quite a nice flat for Peter and Doreen.”

  Harold was unused to hearing his children called by their given names and he almost had to think who it was she meant. They were walking about the house, thinking what changes would have to be made when they were married. Or Myra was thinking of these things. Harold had supposed he and she would simply go along to some register office, presumably the Wood Green one, and get through the requisite very few words after which he would be a married man again. He was used to being married, found it difficult to sleep without a woman in his bed and hoped to resume the state with the minimum of upheaval. He considered what Myra had said and it seemed to him a tremendous step, comparable to changing one’s trade or emigrating.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. When he used this phrase he meant not that he was ignorant on the subject but that he had doubts of its wisdom or feasibility.

  “It seems so peculiar, a grown-up son and daughter living at home.”

  “I lived at home till I got married.” And after, he might have added.

  “Well, in those days …” Harold was fifteen years older than her, and she thought of herself as a girl; “He’s a widower, he’s got children practically my age,” she was inclined to say when speaking of her future husband. “They could have a bedroom each and the front room for a lounge. I don’t see why we shouldn’t put in a kitchen, a sink and water heater really, that’s all that’s needed. I don’t mind paying, I’ll use my Unit Trusts.”

  “You’ll have to tell them. I can’t.”

  Harold avoided everything disagreeable. It was to this negative aim that he devoted his energies. Walking half a mile to work, poking about in the shop all day (he knew a great deal about typewriters), going home again—he did not object to any of that. He liked having a big house to spread himself in, though he never spread himself much, mooching between the kitchen, the breakfast room and the once-sacred bedroom. He liked living in the house in which he had been born, the only place he had ever lived in. His leisure he devoted to reading what he called “history books,” biographies of the more colorful characters in history such as Mary Queen of Scots, Nell Gwynn, and the Prince Regent (never Cromwell, Robespierre, or Palmerston) and the memoirs of princelings and princesslings of nineteenth-century European minor royal houses. As a result of this, he was actually an authority, not, as he believed, on history itself, but on the myth and legend of history.

  In the end he had to tell them. Myra wasn’t there to do it. She was packing up in West Hampstead, telling the married man she had had a better offer, thank you very much, and when he had gone, crying herself to sleep.

  Dreading it, loathing the idea of it, working himself up to a pitch of fear and shame, which was the exaggerated state he always got into if he had to exert himself or be candid, Harold falteringly told his daughter that Myra wanted her and Pup to move upstairs. As is generally so in these cases, Dolly took it much better than had been expected. She didn’t scream or cry or attack him but was merely haughty.

  “I wouldn’t want to live in the same place as her anyway. I’d rather go up there. At least we’ll be on our own, we’ll be independent. I don’t want to associate with her more than’s strictly necessary.”

  “Don’t be like that, Dolly,” said Harold feebly.

  “I will be like it. You said you’d never get over Mother, that’s what you said.”

  “We’ll be all right on our own,” said Pup when he got home from work. “It’ll be nice.”

  “Yes, it will. It’ll be lovely, just you and me. We’ll be all right, won’t we, Pup? We’ll be happy, just the two of us.”

  “Of course we will, dear,” said Pup.

  Dolly wasted no time. Next morning she lugged up to the top floor everything she wanted, chairs and tables and mirrors and a cabinet and a desk, table linen and bed linen and china and glass as well as Edith’s sewing machine. Harold scarcely noticed. He never required more than a chair to sit on and a bed to lie on. Myra didn’t care, she was going to get new anyway. Mrs. Brewer had not been accurate when she said Myra had nothing; she had her Unit Trusts and her National Savings, getting on for 1,500 pounds, the way it had mounted up over the years.

  They were married in March. Harold came back from his honeymoon in Newquay to find Pup and Dolly moved upstairs and the house so silent as to give a false idea that it was occupied solely by his wife and himself. Myra made real coffee in the filter pot she had bought in St. Ives and open sandwiches with hard-boiled egg and tuna. Harold would have preferred Wall’s pork pies and tomatoes and a pot of tea but he was not a man who complained. He sat quietly reading the memoirs of Princess Marie-Louise for the third or fourth time.

  Next day father and son met in the shop just before 9:30. Pup was as kindly and polite as ever. He had run the business in his father’s absence and had run it efficiently, even keeping the books for the sales tax. Harold was teaching him how to service and repair typewriters and when he knew enough he said he was going to do outside servicing, visiting homes and offices. No other company in the vicinity was willing to do that and it was just the fillip they needed in this recession.

  They went home together. On the way they called at the library and Pup carried Harold’s books home inside his coat because it had started to rain. Myra ran from the kitchen to kiss Harold in the manner of a brand-new wife. There was a spicy smell of something made with peppers and curry that was as new to the house as Myra was. Not yet back at her job, she had had all day in which to cook and to beautify the place and herself, beginning as soon as Harold had left with a fresh application of henna to her hair.

  During their long affair, the married man had given Myra a lot of fairly good jewelry. She hung it on herself liberally and, when she was dressed up, without restraint. She was wearing the navy blue acrylic blouse and emerald-and-navy-and-white check skirt which formed part of what she called her “trousseau,” and round her neck, half-a-dozen gold chains from which were suspended a gold wishbone, a gold four-leaved clover, a gold and ivory dice and other such toys. She had her best gold watch on and her charm bracelet and her former lover’s ring with the fire opal that quite eclipsed Harold’s wedding band.

  Pup stood in front of her, smiling first at his father and then at her, as if giving them his blessing in a paternal way. Myra wondered if he was quite right in the head. He put out his hand and lifted the gold chains which hung over the large well-braced promontory of Myra’s bosom. She jumped at Pup’s touch; she couldn’t help it. Pup gave her another smile, reassuring this time. He examined the wishbone, the four-leaved clover and the dice as if they interested him greatly, and he lifted Myra’s hand and looked at the charms on her bracelet. Myra began to feel nervous and uncomfortable and she nearly said something sharp, when a diversion was created by the workmen descending the stairs. These were the men she had got in to install a sink and a water heater in the smallest of the five rooms on the top floor. She snatched her hand away from Pup and the gold chains flew about, jangling.

  “That’s the lot then,” the plumber said. “I’ll pop in in the morning and check your taps.”

  “I was thinking,” Myra said in the rather shrill way she had when she was not at ease, “while you’re here, why don’t we go the whole hog and have a bathroom put in for Peter and Doreen?

  “I don’t know about that,” said Harold.

  “It’s not very civilized, is it? To be perfectly honest, it’s not ideal, is
it, having just the one bathroom in a house this size?”

  “Planning permission’d have to be got,” said the plumber. “Planning permission is essential prior to the installation of your water closet.”

  “All right. Why not? How d’you go about it?”

  The only possible convertible room was his temple. Pup said in his gentle way, in his soft, low voice, “Dolly and I don’t need our own bathroom, thank you very much. For such a short time—” he smiled at Myra “—it would be a waste of money.” He said, “Excuse me,” to the workmen and walked past them up the stairs.

  “What do you think Peter meant by ‘such a short time,’ Hal?” said Myra, dishing up stuffed peppers. She called her husband Hal because no one else had ever done so and it had a dashing ring, rather out of keeping with Harold’s appearance. Pup’s remark had made her think. In fact, he had only meant by it that he intended to share a house with her for no longer than he could help, and as soon as his ship came in, he would move out.

  “Ask me another,” said Harold. He took the plate and said, “I thang you!” after the manner of Arthur Askey, which he thought and believed Myra would think a witty and sparkling rejoinder.

  “You don’t suppose he’s thinking of getting married himself?” said Myra, asking him another.

  “Don’t make me laugh. He’s only eighteen.”

  “It would be the best thing really for all of us, though I don’t suppose there’s much chance for poor Doreen.”

  Harold said nothing for a moment. He was still overcome at the conversion of the horrible, dark, dirty, old dining room into a reasonable place to eat in. The looping up of the port-wine-colored velvet curtains with lengths of red ribbon and the provision of a few blue scyllas in a Denbyware honeypot, which would have struck most people as pathetic, seemed to him only awesome. He had never before tasted green peppers and he didn’t think he liked them much. There was a napkin with a bit of lace in one corner but he felt it would be going rather far to wipe his mouth on it.

  “Dolly?” he said. “I don’t know about that.” Harold wanted to impress his wife with his wit but the only way he knew how to do this was by being facetious or coarse. From some old stock of such phrases he dredged up a metaphor: “You don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire.”

  “What an awful thing to say,” said Myra coldly. “Does that go for your own married life, too?”

  Harold nearly said he didn’t know about that. Hastily he brought out instead something about her being too young and pretty for him really, people would call him a cradle snatcher. The truth was that while embracing Myra on the previous night, not in the Newquay hotel but for the first time in the matrimonial bed in the sacred bedroom, her resemblance to his dead wife, at first so seemingly attractive, had unnerved him. The room was dark but not absolutely dark, for the light from a yellow street lamp penetrated the olive-colored curtains, shedding a pale green luminosity. Myra’s face had looked glaucous and gaunt while her red hair spread out over the pillow just as Edith’s had. A certain amount of guilt had been affecting him—not much but a little—over his failure to visit his dying wife during her last days. He could imagine how she must have looked, though. With Myra he had been unwise enough to look at the mantelpiece while he poked the fire and he had had the horrible notion he was making love to a corpse. Much more of that and he wouldn’t be able to do it at all.

  “Can I give you some charlotte russe?” said Myra.

  Dolly had made no fuss about moving upstairs because anything was preferable to sharing living space with Myra. At first she was stunned by what had happened and happened so quickly. In spite of the reassuring things she had said to Pup, the things a dispossessed mother says, she had felt helpless. She had felt lost or as if all her security had been knocked from under her feet and left her floating towards danger and want. It was now that she needed that friend to confide in and consult for advice. Wendy Collins might have been that friend, for a day or two Dolly thought she could be, but it was strange, whenever she opened her mouth to talk to Wendy about Myra, to explain what it was like to be deposed and pushed out, to have Myra down there, the words remained trapped inside her and what came out were things about the weather and the price of food.

  She tried to get on with her sewing but it was neither so easy nor so pleasant up there. Mrs. Collins, who had been her best customer, had varicose veins and refused to climb all those stairs for fittings. There was no way out of the house except through the hall whether Dolly sought the street or the old railway line. She got to know when Myra went to work. Monday and Wednesday and Friday mornings and all day Thursday, and she tried to pass through the hall only at those times herself. Thursdays she longed for, just to feel herself alone and free in her own home again. The rest of the days she took to spending more and more time in the temple, just sitting in there and being quiet. Or she would sit on the cushions, reading his books, with a single joss stick burning. Unlike her father, Dolly had never been a reader of fiction. Fiction was about beautiful women and handsome lovers and adventure and the great world, about which Dolly knew nothing and which frightened her. It was about people who had friendships with other people.

  The books were always back in their right places when Pup came home from work. Like a wife, she had ready for him the food he liked: cold barbecued chicken, pork pies, turkey roll, tomatoes, potato crisps, tinned peaches and evaporated milk, real dairy-cream-filled sponge, chocolate digestives, dry roasted peanuts. She always offered him a glass of her wine but he nearly always refused. He spent all evening in the temple and she was mostly invited to be with him. But like a wise mother she knew better than to obtrude into his life to that extent; she knew when to say no.

  “I don’t think I will tonight, Pup,” she would say and go and sit in the dormer window, her left cheek turned to the street. On the window sill there and on her bedroom window sill at the back she kept a little mound of stones to throw at Gingie. But he never sat on the post as Fluffy had done or ventured into the Yearmans’ back garden. Those evenings she sometimes drank a whole bottle of wine.

  “She’s practically an alcoholic, that girl,” said Myra to her mother. “You should see the bottles. I shall have to get a second dustbin. You should see that house! I’d no idea. To be perfectly honest, it needs thousands spent on it. She never cleaned it and I don’t suppose the first wife did. I’ve got my work cut out there for years to come.”

  “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 b
ut 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.