The Killing Doll

by Ruth Rendell

  He did not speak. There was no one to speak to, for Diarmit had gone.

  It was the girl’s first day in the Unisex salon in Tottenham Lane and Pup’s first visit. They closed at lunchtime on Mondays and he was her last client. His was also the nicest hair she had handled that morning, fair and wavy, more like a girl’s than a man’s.

  “You could do anything with your hair,” she said.

  “Like what? Knit it? Grow it up a beanstalk?”

  She giggled. “I mean have it in any style. You know what I mean.”

  “Okay, stop that cutting and I’ll have dreadlocks. They said your name but I didn’t catch it. Anthea?”

  “Andrea. I’m going to start the blow-drying now.”

  “Wait a minute. The racket it makes kills me. Look, Andrea, I don’t know how I’ll get through the day if you won’t say you’ll come out with me tonight.”

  “I don’t even know your name,” said Andrea.

  “You’ve only got to ask. It’s Peter. And you like my hair, don’t you? That’s a start. We can go to the new disco in the Broadway …”

  Pup had to pick up Dolly first. He got to Shelley Drive at two minutes past six. Because he was going dancing, he was wearing his tightest jeans but, changing quickly on his return home from work, an idea had come to him that for Dolly’s sake he should impress Yvonne Colefax with some sort of weird or magicianly air. Dolly had told him how she and Yvonne had been up to the temple together and how Yvonne remembered him as a clairvoyant. So he put on a plain black velvet sweatshirt and hung round his neck on a long thong the solar talisman—gold letters on black painted metal—he had made for himself when he was sixteen. It was a costume equally appropriate for the disco. Perhaps this thought rather summed up the attitude Pup had come to take towards the practice of magic arts.

  The Colefax home was a white-walled, green-roofed hacienda whose architecture also owed something to art deco and Moroccan influence and had in its pillared porch a hint of Palladio. It was not the largest house but among the larger houses in quiet, luxurious, bosky Shelley Drive and its grounds ranged extensively. Those in the front were an intricate lay-out of little rockeries, cypress trees, gravel walks and geometric flowerbeds, while on the far side at the back a red lacquer Chinese bridge, such as one associates with the Summer Palace of Peking, could be glimpsed. The lawns, as smoothly green as the jade silk dress Pup had seen Dolly making for Yvonne, obviously required the at least twice-weekly attentions of the old-age pensioner who was at present steering round the turf with an electric lawn mower. Yvonne came down the steps when she heard the van’s tyres crunch on the gravel. She was in a candy-pink lawn dress and she looked very young and fragile.

  “It’s lovely to see you again. Come in and have a drink. Do you know, I always think of you as some sort of supernatural being, a kind of guru perhaps.”

  Pup smiled. They walked across expanses of oak parquet on which pink and yellow Kashmiri rugs were artlessly spread, to where Dolly sat on a terrace in a white cane chair. There was an empty wine bottle on the white wrought-iron table and another bottle which Dolly was rapidly emptying. Pup said he would have a glass of sherry. From the terrace you could see no other houses, only lawns and shrubberies and, surrounding it all, an apparent woodland whose foliage doubtless concealed other scattered palaces. The Chinese bridge spanned a little lake in which swam fish as vermilion as its lacquer. Dolly said the swimming pool was behind that hedge over there.

  Yvonne came back with sherry and dry roasted peanuts in a glass dish. She sat in the swing seat and her wispy pink skirt rode up a little to show off her legs that the sun had tanned to a very light biscuit color.

  “I was reading something in a magazine the other day. About ESP and harnessing energy and making use of powers we don’t know we have. It said that, in the future, we’d take it for granted these powers existed, we’d accept telepathy as a fact like—like electricity. It said there was about ninety percent of our brains never got used but still there was this enormous—well, potential in them. That’s the kind of thing you do, isn’t it?”

  She spoke as if she had learned it all off by heart for him, like a little girl reciting a poem she barely understands for a teacher she admires. He was curiously touched. He nodded.

  “The power of your mind could alter the way another person’s mind thinks and feels?”

  “That would be the theory.”

  She turned away. “I shall be all alone after you’ve gone. I haven’t seen George since Saturday morning. I don’t suppose he’ll bother to come home tonight.”

  Dolly said, “I could stay for the evening. My brother won’t mind coming back for me, will you, Pup?”

  “Pup?” said Yvonne.

  “A pet name,” Pup said imperturbably. “And I’m afraid I would mind. I’ve an appointment, I’m going out.”

  Dolly looked disappointed but proud. “He goes to this society,” she explained to Yvonne. “It’s a kind of sacred order, like—well, Templars or Freemasons, but they learn to be adepts in the occult.”

  She was quoting directly from some book, Pup thought, but he didn’t deny that the meeting place of the Golden Dawn was his destination that evening. He finished his sherry and got up.

  Not much more than an hour later he was gyrating with Andrea under the orange, viridian and purple rippling lights of the Damaria Disco and Wine Bar.

  She said nothing to him of the small adventure which had befallen her during the afternoon. She did not yet know him well enough for that. She had gone home to the room she rented in a house at Mount Pleasant Green, expecting the house to be empty at that hour, expecting to have a quiet afternoon setting the room to her liking and arranging her things. On the way there she had bought three small houseplants from a florist: a Christmas cactus, a croton, and a fern.

  It was like the continuous low rumble of thunder overhead. But a noise which is, so to speak, an act of God is much easier to put up with than that made, and deliberately or thoughtlessly made, by man. The sound was immediately above her, coming from the room over hers, at the back and on the top floor. There were only two rooms on the top because of the way the roof sloped. Andrea went down to the front door and went outside and read under the topmost bell the name “Diarmit Bawne,” printed in a hand that seemed unused to handling a pen.

  She had suffered from the noise for more than two hours. Suppose it went on at night too? She would have to move out and she had only just moved in. It took nerve to go up there but she screwed herself up to it and went. She knocked timidly on the door and then had to knock again.

  It was a young man who opened the door. He was in his middle twenties but she would have described him as a boy, a nondescript boy, neither tall nor short, with dusty-looking brown hair—that his hair was dirty she particularly noticed—and features that looked as if roughly shaped out of putty, gray eyes that stared. She spoke in a rush.

  “Excuse me, but would you mind not pacing all the time? You’ve been pacing up and down for nearly three hours, I timed you. I’ve got the room below you and the noise is really awful.

  I don’t like complaining but I just don’t think I can stand any more of it.”

  She wondered why he was looking at her so strangely. Not with antagonism or resentment, it wasn’t that, but almost as if he were surprised she existed and could speak at all.

  “I mean,” she said in her nervousness, “if it’s the exercise you need, couldn’t you go out for a walk? Or is it—” she had read in a novel about someone pacing up and down like a caged lion “—that you’re worried about something?”

  “I can’t go out.” He spoke hoarsely, in a thick salivary Irish brogue. “I’m allergic, you see.”

  Allergic to what? Air? Light? She did not feel she could ask. The window was closed and the room had a fetid, sweetish, sweaty smell. The dark red clothes he wore looked as if they had never been washed or cleaned.

  “Well, if you could just try not to walk up and down so much.�
� She said it awkwardly, confronted by those curious opaque eyes. “Can’t they do anything for your allergy?”

  He shook his head. “Nobody can do a thing.”

  She felt a rush of pity for him. She thought she should speak his name before she went but she didn’t know how to pronounce his Christian name. It was a strange way to address someone only a year or so her senior but, “It is Mr. Bawne, isn’t it?”

  “It is not.” He sounded angry and Andrea took a step back. “Conal’s the name,” he said, “Conal Moore.”

  18

  The flat was a block at the top of East Heath Road. It was one of those Hampstead blocks that from the outside look more like a Georgian country house. Ashley Clare lived at No. 24. Yvonne had told Dolly that he worked in the West End, he was a designer, something to do with stage design, so Dolly knew that if she wanted to see him she would need to be outside Arrowsmith Court quite early in the morning.

  She was torn between her desire to see Ashley Clare and her sense of duty that she must be at home to give Pup his breakfast. She got up very early. Pup’s bedroom door was ajar and she could see his bed had not been slept in. Dolly no longer worried herself half to death that Pup might have been mugged or run over but these fears had been replaced by another.

  Myra’s heels clattered across the landing and Myra’s voice said: “You know very well he had that girl friend, Doreen. I mean, she went away somewhere but that doesn’t mean he’s never going to have another, does it?”

  Edith whispered in Dolly’s ear. “I shouldn’t object if he found himself a nice ladylike girl. He’ll be wanting to get married one of these days.”

  “To be perfectly honest with you, Doreen, a nice-looking boy like that who’s earning good money isn’t going to live like a monk, is he?”

  Dolly, tormented, made a striking motion at them over her shoulder. She swatted them away like flies. Harold’s snores could be heard, rising and falling, though it was broad daylight. Dolly dressed herself in her blue plaid dress with the plain blue collar, and she put on navy blue tights and her cream sandals. Yvonne was making her more clothes conscious. There must come a point, surely, when you dressed so well, you looked so smart and elegant, that no one noticed your face. Or would they notice it more? Hair that was flat on top and frizzed out at the sides had got very fashionable. Suppose she were to have that done, the frizz part covering up her cheeks? Dolly shook her head at her own image. She had never in her life been to a hairdresser. Her mother had cut her hair, and after her mother died, she had done it herself with the dressmaking scissors and a razor comb. She knew she would never dare go to a place like the Unisex salon Pup went to and put her blemished head into a stylist’s hands.

  She walked to the bus stop and got the No. 210 bus. Hampstead Heath lay mysteriously veiled in the first mist of autumn. Dolly was not entirely sure why she was there or what she intended to do. Principally, of course, to have a sight of Ashley Clare. She began imagining a future in which George returned to Yvonne and she and Pup became their best friends. They would visit each other’s homes in the evening and drink wine. Perhaps they would even go away on holiday together. Dolly had not been on a holiday since she was a child when sometimes the whole family went to the Isle of Wight and sometimes to Newquay. She thought she might enjoy a holiday if she had Pup and Yvonne there to cushion her from the world, and George, that unknown quantity, who was a doctor as well as a dentist and who might …

  By then Pup would have learned all there was to learn about the science of magic. He would be a master. He might still go to the Golden Dawn sometimes—once a month, say—but for the rest of the time he would stay at home, working in the temple. It would be more a laboratory than a temple really, a place where he could make dreams come true for the four of them. Dolly touched her face where the wind had blown her hair aside.

  She was outside Arrowsmith Court now. The glass entrance doors were open and two or three people came out, bound for work. A man got into one of the parked cars and drove off down East Heath Road. Dolly worried in case, early though it was, not yet 8:30, she had already missed Ashley Clare. But as she was beginning to feel awkward hanging about there, to feel that soon one of those departing commuters would come over and ask her what she wanted, the glass doors swung open and the man in the photograph came out.

  He looked older. That was only to be expected. Photography done with a flash rejuvenates in a way that early morning light does not. He looked thinner, his face was a little worn, and he was formally dressed in a dark gray suit. But he was unmistakably the man George Colefax had called a beautiful boy. Dolly walked along behind him. She followed him down Heath Street. He was carrying a briefcase and, over his left arm, a folded, cream-colored raincoat.

  Dolly was sure he must be heading for Hampstead tube station, and as she walked, she got her ten-pence pieces ready for the ticket machine. Ashley Clare went through into the lift with his season ticket. She followed him in just before the doors closed. From the raincoat pocket he took a copy of The Times—it had presumably been delivered to his door—and folding it as small as it would go, began doing the crossword puzzle.

  Sex had played very little part in Dolly’s life. She tried never to think of it in relation to herself. And she seemed to have known few people to whom sex was important, though the memory of what she had discovered of Myra and her father sometimes still brought her a small shudder. That Pup was uninterested in sex she was certain—hadn’t he told her in innocent confession that he was a virgin? This statement may be perfectly true one day and false the next but that never crossed Dolly’s mind. She had never, as far as she was aware, known a homosexual. She was no reader and her social life was sparse. But nevertheless, though near the perimeter of it and in the shadows, she lived in her world and its culture. She had an image of a homosexual, a queer, as a mincing creature with scented after-shave and blusher on his face, one who would give you sidelong looks and call you “my dear.” Ashley Clare, though undeniably very handsome, looked like any normal man, smelled of nothing at all and when he encountered an acquaintance on the platform, lifted his head from the crossword and said a laconic ’“Morning.”

  The train came in and Dolly followed him into a non-smoker. Ashley Clare sat next to the window in one of the double seats facing the front of the train and Dolly managed to seat herself at right angles to it and immediately behind him. At Belsize Park, the next stop, the train filled up. People were crammed in and standing all down the aisle. That made it hard for anyone to look at anyone else. Dolly knew, anyway, that no one would do more than glance at her and look away. The nevus embarrassed people and made them feel guilty, so no one ever looked at her for long.

  Ashley Clare’s head and about six inches of his shoulders and back projected above the back of the seat. He was printing in the solutions to his puzzle. Dolly began picking black and silver hairs, mostly black ones, off the collar of his suit jacket. If anyone did happen to see her doing this, they would suppose him to be her husband. They would think them husband and wife who had been unable to get seats side by side and now she was performing a belated grooming on him before they separated to go to their jobs.

  He felt nothing. He didn’t even twitch his shoulders. She got eight hairs and slipped them into her purse between two pound notes. It was a Bank train, heading for the City, and at Camden Town he left it, presumably to change for Tottenham Court Road or Leicester Square. Dolly also got out and went through the passages to where she could get a northbound train for the Archway. There she stood on the platform, waiting for the train to come and remembering how, on this very spot or close by, she had come within a centimeter and a second of pushing the woman in green over, believing her to be Myra.

  But there was no need for such calculated violence when Pup could kindle or destroy with words and water.

  Harold sat at the kitchen table, unable to eat. The food was the kind he liked, processed, packaged junk food that Edith and more recently Dolly had always g
iven him, but he pushed it about his plate, staring disconsolately around him.

  It was twenty years since he had eaten a meal without reading a book at the same time. When the children were little and Edith busy with them, he had begun to take a book to the table with him and no one had minded or even noticed. It had become a habit. Now he could no longer read, writing had inhibited or exorcised reading for him, and therefore he could not eat. It seemed to him that during the months he had spent writing Her Highness My Sister, the library had got in a more than usually rich collection of royal, archducal and aristocratic biographies. They waited temptingly for him when his task was done and the typescript out of his hands, and once he had posted the parcel, off he had gone to the Haringey central library and taken out a wonderful 600-page-long life of Queen Louise of Prussia. He could not read it. The print danced, the sense of the words registered hardly at all, the impetus was gone. The substance of his own novel, which he knew practically by heart, interposed itself between his eyes and Queen Louise and he was forced to lay the book aside in mounting panic.

  It made him feel ill. He had hunger pains like a stitch in his side that for a while he thought was the onset of a heart attack and that he might be going to fall down dead like Myra’s mother or poor Ronald Ridge. Of course he did not give up at once. He tried a biography of Stanislas II, the collected letters of the Albanian royal family and fictionalized memoirs of Madame de Montespan, all, however, to no avail. Just as working in a sweet factory is said to put one off chocolate, so the manufacture of history had made the finished product revolting to him. It had been a kind of aversion therapy.

  “You’re not eating, Dad,” Dolly said. “If you don’t want your pie, have a piece of Battenburg cake. Go on. You must eat.”

  He shook his head. He was losing weight and he had never had much flesh on him to start with. The next day was Ronald Ridge’s funeral, same time, same place, and by the look of the sky it would be raining again.