by Ruth Rendell
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
The 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.
Dolly was so close to him she could read along the line of his thoughts. Not read them, thank God, but read along the periphery of them.
“You’ve got a meeting of the Golden Dawn tomorrow night, haven’t you?”
Pup nodded. He was going round to Suzanne’s.
“Will you tell them?”
He looked at her. The question that came into his mind was, would a normal person ask that? “Tell them what?” he stalled.
“How you did magic and made Myra die.”
His own steady sanity recoiled. Every word was an affront. He suddenly saw clearly what he wanted from life and meant to have: pleasure, joy, peace, material things, money, worldly success, women. And, looking hopelessly at her, he saw something else, too. It had all come about because of him. If he had never sold his soul to the devil, Dolly would never have heard of the occult, if he had done no magic, not made the temple, Dolly would have thought magic something conjurors did for kids at parties. He had begun it and for her sake as well as his own he couldn’t let her down now. He smiled at her.
“We—you—can tell people I can harness certain powers. I can make things happen, if you like, but we mustn’t tell them about Myra. Can’t you see that, dear? You’re not allowed to kill people, you know that, it’s against the law.”
She nodded. When she spoke after a moment or two, he thought with relief that she had changed the subject.
“You’ve got your driving test tomorrow?”
“Yes, at ten.”
She laid her hand on his arm. “Let’s go into the temple and perform a Pentagram ritual for success.”
“I’m going to pass anyway.”
“Isn’t that what you learn magic for? Isn’t that what you sold your soul for? For success and getting what you want?”
How well she had learned the lessons he had taught her! He had run out of joss sticks but that was no excuse as she had bought some herself to keep in stock for him. She sat on the cushion with her glass of wine, watching him make the Cabalistic Cross and utter the prescribed words for success in a coming venture.
The next day he passed his driving test as he had known he would.
“Now you’ll be wanting us to get that van, I daresay,” said Harold.
“I’m taking delivery this afternoon.”
Harold, who had been in the middle of an account of the sorrows of Prince Leopold after the death in childbirth of the Princess Charlotte, a subject fairly appropriate to his own situation, stuck his finger in the book to keep his place. “You haven’t wasted much time.”
“What were you thinking of doing with the money you get from Mrs. Brewer’s flat?” said Pup.
“Now you wait a minute, you hold your horses, that’ll be months and months.”
“Maybe. We should be able to get a good big bank loan on the strength of it, though. I want you to put it all in the business. We could take over one of those shops in Crouch Hill when the leases fall in in the summer and go into word processors. I’ve got it all worked out.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Harold, turning pale. “There’s a recession on or hadn’t you heard?”
“That’s the time to expand. There won’t always be a recession. I’ve got my eye on that new tower block going up at the Archway.”
“We’re not moving into any tower block.”
“Of course not. It’s something else I’ve got in mind.” Harold gave him a hopeless look and returned to his reading. “All this drive,” he said. “I don’t know where you get it from.”
“I don’t know where we’re going to go,” said Suzanne, sitting on her bed and handing Pup his cup of herb tea. “They say they’ll go in the bathroom
for half an hour but I draw the line at that.”
“I’ve got a car,” said Pup. “Well, a van. No windows in the back and I’ve bought one of those duvets.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Come and see. I thought we might go up on the Heath.”
“You know, you’re pretty amazing,” said Suzanne, twining herself round him.
They were putting up a block of old people’s flats on the site at Mount Pleasant Green. It was so cold that the frost lay white on the builders’ tarpaulins and stacks of bricks. The air was still but with a cutting edge to it and the sky sparkled with stars rarely seen in the London suburbs. There was a starry-eyed look about the lighted houses that surrounded the green as if surprised by the bitter cold that had suddenly clamped down on them.
“I always feel better once the winter solstice is behind us,” said Miss Finlay, scurrying along so fast that Dolly had to trot to keep up with her. “You know the days are getting longer even if you don’t feel it.”
A handwritten and hand-drawn poster advertised Roberta Fitter’s seance. Dolly had paid her five pounds, she was coming willingly, but she rather resented that poster. “They ought to have my brother here.”
“He’s not a medium, though, is he, dear?”
“He could be. He’s got amazing powers. I had this cold last week and he cured it. My colds usually go on for weeks but my brother did this special invocation and next day it was practically gone.”
Talking about him recalled to her mind how he had refused to come with her. Well, not refused exactly. He had a meeting to go to. But she felt the lack of his company. It had been so nice last time. He was always out now and she was always alone. That was why she had come here tonight, to see Edith again, if possible to bring Edith more positively back with her, to have more of her than an occasionally heard voice. And as she entered the hall she sniffed the air, hoping for an early foretaste of lemon scent, but the place smelt faintly of some kind of cleaning fluid and tonight Miss Finlay had used lavender water.