The Killing Doll

by Ruth Rendell

  Wendy bought the Chinese girl doll with the black pigtail and the dark blue quilted jacket. She wanted it for a present for a friend’s child whose birthday wasn’t until November. She might as well buy it now, she said, since she didn’t expect she would be seeing much of Dolly once the trouser suit was finished. Dolly was left alone with the ballet girl and the Chinese boy, who sat together on the mantelpiece staring across the room at Myra’s now dead rubber plant and Myra’s calendar for the previous year.

  Pup did the Rosy Cross ritual to banish Myra. Long ago he had told Dolly that, if you became involved in the serious practice of geomancy, it was likely that the invisible world would begin to intrude on your everyday life. He had told her and then she had read it in one of his books. It might take the form of a series of coincidences or of poltergeist activity or simply of strange sights and sounds. The ritual of the Rosy Cross extended a protection against such things; it placed a barrier or veil between you and them.

  As soon as Dolly told him about the voices and the invisible hands, Pup wanted to do the ritual. He said she must have faith in the ritual and then she would be all right. They had gone into the temple together, Pup had made crosses and circles in the air with an incense stick and had chanted:

  “Virgo, Isis, Mighty Mother,

  Scorpio, Apophis, Destroyer,

  Sol, Osiris, Slain and Risen,

  Isis, Apophis, Osiris,

  Ee-ay-oo, el-ewe-ex, lux, light,

  The Light of the Cross,

  Let the Light descend!”

  As Pup and the book had promised, Myra went away after that. But she came back and Edith came back with her. Dolly knew she could have asked Pup to do the ritual again or even attempted it herself and one evening she tried it, chanting the words from the book and making the signs with a sandalwood joss stick. But she had barely finished when she sensed the two women had come into the temple. The lemon scent was so strong it overcame that of the sandalwood. She heard Myra’s light brittle laugh.

  Edith said: “That’s Pup’s job, dear. Better leave that sort of thing to Pup.”

  He was away that night and the next and the next on a weekend course in Hertfordshire, learning how to operate the Infra-Hyposonic XH450 word processor. The manufacturers liked retailers as well as prospective customers to be conversant with the intricacies of their equipment. The course was in a country house called West Lawn near Puckeridge. Pup was not the only man there but he was the only one under forty. Most of the girls were young and pretty. It was more like a model school seminar than instruction in working a glorified typewriter.

  Apart from the obvious one, Pup recognized an immediate affinity between himself and the prettiest girl. She lived in Islington, a mile or so from his own home. After the Saturday lesson and the lecture on advanced techniques, he drove her down into the village for drinks and chicken and chips at The Green Man.

  “Have you got a girl friend, Peter?”

  “She just got engaged to someone else,” said Pup with perfect truth. Suzanne, having found out about Philippa and an occasional pal of Pup’s called Terri, had declared on the rebound her intention of marrying the brother of one of the students. “Rather sad but I suppose that’s life. I’ll survive.”

  In the van she sat close up to him. She had a bottle of wine in her room, she said, and if he didn’t mind its not being iced …

  “The sadness isn’t so bad,” said Caroline. “It’s the frustration I mind, it’s so—well, kind of degrading.”

  “Here, let me,” said Pup, taking the corkscrew from her. He gave her his other-worldly look. “I wouldn’t know about that, never yet having succumbed. That may have been part of the trouble with Suzanne. But I mustn’t bore you with my problems. Cheers.”

  “Cheers. Do you mean what I think you mean?”

  Pup nodded. “I had this idea of saving myself for the perfect girl, Caroline.” He took her hand. “A kind of crazy idealism, I suppose you’ll say.”

  “It’s the most romantic thing I ever heard!”

  He got home to hear that the estate agents had found a buyer for Mrs. Brewer’s flat. Harold seemed to have lost interest, so Pup had quietly taken the matter over himself. Thirty-one thousand pounds to be paid over a month after exchange of contracts which would be the following week. Caroline had told him that her friend’s sister was secretary to a man who was managing director of a company taking a lease for two floors of the new tower block. It was a new company, starting from scratch, and Caroline not only got hold of its name for him but also the private phone number of this guy her friend’s sister was secretary to.

  What with that and opening the new branch Pup was kept busy. The shop had been a butcher’s and delicatessen, so the whole interior had to be remodeled and refitted. Pup felt rather proud of getting it because he could afford a higher rent than Georgiou, who had had the place before.

  It was time he spent an evening with his sister. It would have been nice to have gone out somewhere, the cinema or for a meal, but one couldn’t associate Dolly with those activities. Dolly wasn’t normal. He faced that now and accepted it, though he worried. The amount of wine she drank worried him, and the voices and the isolation she lived in. But what could he do about it? He couldn’t stay at home every night or lock up her wine or get introductions for her through a marriage bureau. She would never marry. She would never have a job or lead a normal life and he saw that he would have the burden of her for the rest of their lives. He could never leave her, never even contemplate living apart from her.

  These thoughts depressed him, and when he reached home, it was as if they had lifted a veil from his eyes so that for the first time in years he looked at Dolly with no comforting glaze between them. He saw the lines that were beginning to mark her face, particularly the deep lines that ran from nostrils to chin, the curious absent look in her eyes and the way her eyes wandered, no longer coordinated but with the beginning of a strabismus. The great blotch of the nevus was a dark, uncompromising crimson. He noticed how carefully dressed she was, just for an evening alone with him, in a new black-and-red striped dress and with the talisman worn ostentatiously on a bright red ribbon. With a sinking of the heart he thought how an evening alone with him was a high spot of her life.

  It was useless to talk of going out. He ate his supper and tried not to let her see him looking at her as she finished one bottle of wine and started on the second. Inevitably, they would end up in the temple. He had a constricted feeling in his throat, a sensation of a kind of distasteful embarrassment, when he asked her if she would like him to do another Rosy Cross banishing ritual. Several times he had noticed her seeming to listen or holding herself still and staring the way he had sometimes seen Gingie do, alone on the fence or walking on the garden path.

  She shook her head. The voices, at any rate, were company.

  “You ought to do something for Dad,” she said. “You ought to do a ritual for happiness and peace for him.” Even as she spoke she could hear Myra whispering. “He’s only had two books out of the library this week,” she said.

  Pup was relieved. Still she hadn’t asked the question, made the request he dreaded to hear. Perhaps she never would now, perhaps she was losing her faith in him, and gradually the temple and its contents might be allowed to fall into disuse. There was no sign of that happening, though, in Dolly’s manner as they went into the temple and she, with more knowledge than he now retained, outlined to him the kind of Hexagram ritual he should perform.

  It was high summer and from the open window the old railway line could be seen like a bit of countryside lying in sunshine, like a piece out of a Constable painting inexplicably surrounded by buildings. The buddleias made drifts of purple on the green, the poplar leaves trembled in the breeze and showed their silver undersides. Pup closed the window and unhooked his robe from the back of the door. But in doing so he caught it on the hook and tore a rent in the neck opening.

  “It’s all right,” Dolly said, “it’s only th
e facing. I’ll mend it for you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, dear.”

  The long tedious ritual was gone through. Pup did his best to make Dolly believe he had generated a solar hexagram. He forgot the names of the Supernal Triad of the Sephiroth, he forgot most of the names of the angels and planetary spirits. Most of what he intoned he made up as he went along. Dolly was enthralled. She had forgotten to bring the rest of her wine with her and it occurred wryly to Pup as he raised the cup and waved the wand that doing this every evening would be a way of curing her addiction.

  She gazed raptly at him. He went on for an hour or more, remembering just before he finished to ask whoever or whatever it was he had invoked to call down blessings and riches on Harold, their father.

  Pup replaced his weapons on the altar. It had been several weeks since he had handled them, as long since he had worn the robe, and now as he looked down at the hem of it he fancied that it had shrunk. Of course there was another possibility … When he was over twenty?

  While Dolly, carrying the robe for mending, went downstairs to make their hot chocolate, he slipped into the bedroom that had formerly been his and after Myra’s death had become his again. Very faint but still discernible on the wall were the measuring marks he had made when he was fifteen. He stood close up against them and made a new mark with a pencil. Yes, it was as he had thought, he had grown another inch. At twenty he had grown another inch and attained five feet eight. Pup laughed for joy but softly. He ran downstairs. Dolly was in the kitchen, standing over the stove, listening to a voice that spoke to her from invisible lips, her hand behind her ear the better to hear it.

  The next day, when the doorbell rang, Dolly thought it was Wendy Collins come for a fitting, though she had said she couldn’t come before Friday. But while she had been sitting with her back to the window, sorting through her cotton reels for one of golden thread to mend Pup’s robe, she had heard a car draw up. One glance told her it wasn’t Wendy’s; even if Wendy had changed her car, she would not have done so for a long, green, expensive-looking sports model.

  The bell rang again. Dolly did what she always did when she wasn’t expecting a caller and there was someone at the door. She pulled down the curtain of hair so that the edge of it came a little way further than halfway along her eyebrow and about an inch out from her nostril. This was her only preparation, the rest of her she knew was all right.

  The girl on the doorstep was of the kind she most disliked and resented—on sight. They filled her with a resentful misery for which there was no compensation. She did not particularly take against the Myras or Wendy Collinses of this world, the buck-toothed Eileen Ridges or the dried-up Miss Finlays. But those, like this one, who looked as if they belonged to a different, or to a new and glorious, species made her want to turn her back and close her eyes and shut herself up somewhere in the dark.

  The voice was not a girl’s or a woman’s but a shy child’s, a piping voice yet not shrill. “I do hope I’m not disturbing you. I don’t think we’ve ever met. I’m Yvonne Colefax.” She looked and sounded embarrassed.

  Dolly didn’t help her much. “Yes? Was it something to do with Myra?” She had noticed her visitor was holding a largish flat brown paper parcel under one arm.

  “Well, no, I … I mean, I know about you through poor Myra. It was really—well, I’m looking for a dressmaker!”

  Dolly had lost a lot of custom through her alienation from the Spiritists and she felt she could not afford to turn business away, however much she might want to shut her eyes and hide. “You’d better come in,” she said.

  Yvonne had been aghast at the sight of Dolly. Things like that always upset her, any deformity or scar or that kind of thing. She had got it from her father, who had been married to two beautiful women and who taught his daughter that to be beautiful was all she need be and that anything ugly to look at was somehow bad and wrong as well. Not that she felt like that about Dolly; that was a feeling that had long been pushed deep down in Yvonne’s unconscious mind. What she felt was revulsion, pity and a wish she had not come. How terrible it must be to go through life with a disability like that! For a moment it made Yvonne’s own predicament seem light and trivial. But only for a moment. She put the parcel down on the arm of a pine-framed brown-and-white check settee and looked about this room into which she had been once before.

  Dolly was very conscious of what other women wore. She could price their clothes, gauge pretty well where they came from. It was seldom that in her own milieu she saw anyone better dressed than herself. Today she was wearing a dress she had made herself out of a blue linen and polyester mixture with drawn thread work on the collar and pockets, blue sandals and around her neck a small blue, pink and green scarf, casually knotted. But this girl made her look dowdy. It was nothing to do with the nevus, nothing to do with that mark of apartness. She would have made most women look dowdy and clumsy and coarse. Everything about her had a delicate ethereal daintiness; she was a puff-of-wind creature with Chinese porcelain skin, thistledown hair, and her bronze silk dress floated here and clung there like a beech leaf—Dolly found herself remembering childhood book illustrations—on a nymph or pixie.

  They eyed each other warily in the bright sunshine which streamed through the living-room windows. Yvonne was the first to look aside. In a rush, she began explaining how Myra had said Harold’s daughter was a dressmaker, how she had this piece of silk a friend had brought her from Hong Kong, how she just happened to be passing the house. Dolly’s eye was caught by the large diamond cluster engagement ring on Yvonne’s left hand. She had no illusions about her work. She was a good, average, little-woman-down-the-road dressmaker. But was she good enough for a woman who wore Cacharel dresses and bought her sandals at Kurt Geiger? Yvonne unwrapped the parcel and let unroll a length of rather stiff silk. It was of a brilliant uncompromising pea green, the sort of color ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have looked terrible in.

  “You can wear that color,” Dolly said grudgingly. Her dislike was evaporating. The fact was that Yvonne seemed altogether too far removed from her, too remote and different, to feel for her such an ordinary human emotion as dislike.

  “Well, perhaps.” Yvonne spoke in a serious, concentrated way. She began to talk about colors and textures, about greens and whether you should wear gold or silver with them. Dolly said always gold with that particular color. And garnets, if you happened to have them. A simple shift dress, didn’t Dolly think? Dolly had already thought this. She was very nearly enjoying herself. None of her previous customers had had any real interest in clothes; they simply wanted something to cover them or keep them warm, not to be “showy,” nothing flattering or distinctive or elegant. She hadn’t talked clothes like this with anyone since Edith died.

  “You’ll have to have a pattern. I should have a Vogue pattern, they’re the best.”

  But Yvonne had never heard of dress patterns. She had never had anything made before. Dolly opened the pattern box, though she had little hope of finding anything in Yvonne’s size which was probably a ten or even an eight.

  “Couldn’t you sort of make it up yourself? What’s that?”

  Dolly turned round to see Yvonne holding the golden robe which had been hanging over a chair.

  “That’s my brother’s. He’s a—” Dolly hesitated. She knew it might sound strange to the uninitiated. Had Aleister Crowley or Israel Regardie had sisters? “—a magician, a geomancer.”

  Yvonne didn’t look amused or suspicious or even very surprised. “I’ve met your brother. Here and at poor Myra’s funeral. He told me my—my past. And he got it right, all of it in detail. Wasn’t that amazing?”

  “He’s a genius,” Dolly said simply.

  A silence fell. Dolly didn’t know why it should have done, for they had seemed to be getting on so well. She said awkwardly, “I expect I could make the pattern up myself if you just want a straight up-and-down shift. Sleeveless, I expect, and with a turtleneck? I don’t know why they c
all them turtlenecks but straight across at back and front?”

  “Because a turtle’s neck comes out of his shell like that.” She sounded like a child of seven. And it didn’t seem to be affectation, it was real. Myra had said she had had two husbands; she must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight. “I used to have a tortoise in my garden in Shelley Drive but he ran away and got run over. Well, he walked away, they don’t ever run.”

  Dolly found herself saying, “Oh, dear, never mind,” as she might have done once to Pup over some childhood sorrow. “I’d better measure you, hadn’t I? Then I can get it cut out and tacked.”

  She drew the curtains against the sunlight and curious eyes. Yvonne stepped out of her Cacharel to reveal art nouveau limbs and Janet Reger underwear. Thirty-two, twenty-two, thirty-three—Dolly had not yet ventured into the metric system.

  Yvonne put on her dress. She touched the cheeks of the dolls and smiled at them as if they were real children. She touched the robe again. “Like a wizard,” she said. “The wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

  “Yes.”

  “When shall I come for a fitting?”

  They were out in the hall again. “It’s Thursday today. How about next Monday afternoon?” Dolly hesitated. She had an impulse to do something she knew was daring and perhaps reckless, something she had never done before but which now seemed essential. If she let Yvonne go without doing it she knew she would be full of regret. “Have you got a minute?” she said. “I’d like to show you something.”

  “What sort of something?”

  “It’s got to do with my brother.”

  She led the way upstairs. “Poor Myra,” Yvonne sighed at the top of the first flight. Dolly heard Myra’s heel-taps behind the closed bedroom door but she did not think Yvonne would hear them; Myra appeared to no one but herself. She opened the door to the temple and had the satisfaction of hearing Yvonne gasp.