The Killing Doll

by Ruth Rendell

  “It’ll be the best thing, you know,” said Pup. “No more of that racket going on and you won’t have to do anything about him.”

  “I wouldn’t have anyway. Not on my own.” She looked out of the window. It was snowing lightly, flakes melting on the glass and running down. She drew the curtains. “Is there someone else, Peter?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, there is.” He was tired of telling lies, he thought he might try never to tell any more.

  Andrea looked as if she was waiting for him to go so that she could have a good cry. What could he do about that? He had never made her any promises or led her to believe that he felt any more for her than liking sometimes to be with her. She stood up and looked wanly at him. He hugged her and said goodbye and went downstairs out into the snowy evening. They were all gone now, Suzanne married, Philippa in Australia, Terri with a new boy friend. Caroline had never been more than a flash in the pan.

  Fidelity now seemed extraordinarily attractive to him. He wondered if he could ever again fancy a girl who was not blonde, whose eyes were any shade but aquamarine or who weighed more than a featherlight seven stone. He got into the van, switched on the wipers and drove carefully through the driving sleet up to the Bishop’s Avenue.

  It took Dolly a while to believe, fully to realize. Like a trustful cripple she had gone to her Lourdes and the miracle she knew must happen had not happened. There had been no surprise in hearing from Yvonne, the day after the conjuring of Anubis, that Ashley Clare was ill. She had expected that, known it already. And later on she had known he would die, it was simply a matter of time. That he was recovering, that he was better and would get well, was not only dismaying—for a while it was incredible.

  She could not believe that Pup had failed. If the evocation had not worked, it was because he had not known what its purpose was or even of the existence of the little wax figure. It was she who had done it wrong, it was her fault. Gradually she was coming to understand that the evocation had not succeeded, that Ashley Clare was in truth recovering and that this was because she had made a mess of things.

  Yvonne had promised to phone and Dolly waited almost hourly for that phone call. She disliked going out in case Yvonne phoned while she was out. The green cord dungarees hung on a hanger from the picture rail in the living room and the blonde doll in the white diaphanous dress sat on the mantelpiece between the ballet girl and Ashley Clare.

  Dilip Raj phoned for Pup. Someone who said she was a friend of Caroline’s sister phoned for Pup. Wendy Collins phoned. She didn’t say what she wanted apart from asking Dolly how she was. A bit later on she came to the house and behaved in an abstracted way as if she were listening or looking for someone who wasn’t there. Dolly thought she had put on weight. She had never before seen Wendy’s hair in such stiff curls; it looked like a wig.

  “I love your sweet dolls,” she said. “I’ve always liked dolls since I was a wee thing. I never had any time for other toys, only dolls.”

  “Pity you never had any children of your own,” said Dolly.

  Wendy tossed her head. “I’ve got plenty of time yet.

  Would you make me some of those?” She pointed at the dungarees.

  It was the first time Dolly had felt like laughing for ages. But it wasn’t for her to comment on what was suitable or unsuitable for potential customers.

  “If you like.”

  Dolly wondered why she lingered for a good five minutes in the hall before leaving. The phone rang. It was Christopher Theofanou for Pup. Each time the phone rang, every single time, Dolly thought it must be Yvonne. Yet she was never really surprised, for in her heart she knew why Yvonne didn’t phone, why she wanted no more to do with her. She recalled that breath of perfume she had smelt on Pup. Yvonne liked Pup better than ever. Now that she knew him personally, she had probably asked him herself to break up the friendship between her husband and Ashley Clare.

  He might do it for her, Dolly thought, though he would do nothing for his own sister, who loved him like a mother.

  “To be perfectly honest,” Myra said to Edith, “he was just having Doreen on when he said he didn’t believe in magic. Of course he believes in it, it’s his life. He’s still going to those meetings of his, isn’t he?”

  Edith said something Dolly couldn’t catch.

  “He’s at the Golden Dawn now,” said Myra. “It stands to reason he wouldn’t waste all those years of study.”

  Pup didn’t want to kill, that was the trouble. It had upset him, killing Myra, he really only wanted to do white magic. Not even to please Yvonne, not even to bring her husband back to her would he kill Ashley Clare. That, Dolly thought, must have been why Ashley Clare hadn’t died, because Pup hadn’t willed it. She sat by the living-room window, her first glass of wine from the second bottle of the evening in her hand. It was snowing lightly. She heard Harold let himself out of the house. He walked along the pavement under the bare branches of the ginkgo tree without looking up at the lighted window. Since becoming an author, he had taken to wearing a brown tweed hat.

  He was never much comfort to her, yet she felt more alone when he had gone out. If Ashley Clare didn’t die, she would never see Yvonne again. She knew that for certain, she knew it as positively as she believed in Pup’s spells. For promising to get her husband back and then failing, Yvonne would hate her forever.

  During the night there was a frost and icicles hung in fringes from the eaves of houses in Manningtree Grove. In spite of the cold, Dolly got up very early and walked to the Archway and caught the No. 210 bus. She wore her old thick winter coat, one of the few garments she had that she had not made herself, and knee boots and a scarf round her head. She noticed people who had wrapped scarves yashmak-wise round their faces, and while she waited for the bus, she did the same with her scarf. Afterwards she felt just like anyone else, unscarred, unmarked, not set apart, and holding her head high, she looked others in the eye.

  It was George Colefax she hoped to see emerge from the entrance to Arrowsmith Court, not Ashley Clare. She wanted only to check that they had returned from Morocco. Ashley Clare would still be convalescent, would hardly yet venture out early on an icy morning like this one.

  She paced up and down the pavement, rubbing her hands together in their woollen gloves. People were knocking snow off the roofs and bonnets of cars. There was a silvery icing of hoarfrost on the branches of trees. The low sun had come just above the horizon, reminding Dolly of that lovely morning—years ago, it now seemed—when she and Pup had walked along the old railway line to cut the flowering hazel branch at sunrise.

  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?” Edit
h’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

  Pup 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 h
ad 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!”