She had never mentioned Chris before. “How, unfair?” Dorothy asked.
Chairs sat in windows, waiting to be bought. “Edmund makes it sound as if Chris were just trying to trick us,” Clare said. “Edmund never liked him. But Chris never really lied to me. And when he did lie it wasn’t deliberate; he couldn’t help himself. It was that thing in the house.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know so, Dorothy.” People gazed through plate glass at a mute newsreader, multiplied by televisions; he was red-faced, green-faced, grey. “Edmund mentions the doll of John Strong,” Clare said, “and all the dolls they dug up later. But there’s one he never saw, because it was broken. It was Chris’s mother, and him coming out of her. Chris broke it,” she said, moist-eyed, “because it would have made him kill me.”
They crossed the balcony above the market. Dorothy gazed down at the stalls. “Oh, look at that dress,” she said, but Clare hurried ahead as if she hadn’t heard, into the restaurant. Dorothy followed.
She chose a plate of salad. Clare was staring at it. “I’m on a diet,” Dorothy explained, but Clare kept staring; then she looked away. She was certainly in an odd mood. Today she’d been walking more naturally than Dorothy had ever seen her walk before; now she was stumping to the cash desk like an old vagrant woman tramping the streets.
Dorothy was wending her way to a booth when she saw Tim. He was collecting scripts into his briefcase from among the things that crowded his table—a bowl with a tidemark of soup, a lone chip on a plate, a poetry anthology. “There’s Tim Forbes,” she told Clare. “He does our poetry series. Shall we sit with him?”
“I don’t feel like meeting people just now,” Clare said curtly.
“I must introduce you sometime. See you, Tim.”
At her call he glanced up from poking contents into his briefcase. He brushed his flopping hair back ineffectually with one hand, and smiled so widely that she suspected he’d forgotten who she was.
She slid into a booth overlooking the street. The escalator carried fresh tiers of shoppers upward constantly. “Are you all right, Clare?” she said.
“Yes, perfectly.” But her tone wasn’t. She sounded as if she thought Dorothy had been matchmaking, perhaps even that she’d known Tim would be here. Dorothy made to tell her how wrong she was—but it wasn’t worth the unpleasantness. In fact she would like to see Tim married; he seemed gentle, and rather lonely.
Dorothy searched for a change of subject. “Oh, something else in Edmund’s book,” she said. “He says Bob caused all our rows. That isn’t what I told him. Some of the people I used to invite round, that I knew Bob couldn’t stand—Bob was right, they were terribly posy. I only kept inviting them because he said I shouldn’t. I never see them now.”
Clare’s expression made her falter. She was staring, as if she’d just realized she had lost something. No, it was worse than that—as if she’d seen there had been no reason at all for her to lose it. She looked as if she were about to speak, then her lips pinched shut.
Obviously she didn’t want to talk about Bob. “Is George Pugh’s cinema still going?”Dorothy said.
“Yes.”
“Does he still put on films for your kids?”
“Yes,” Clare said even more abruptly, and filled her mouth with food, leaving no room for conversation.
Wasn’t Dorothy supposed to say anything at all? At this rate she might as well have stayed at Radio Merseyside and eaten sandwiches—and not got wet, either. It wasn’t just that Clare disliked to be reminded of Bob. She hadn’t minded before, when they were walking. But since they’d reached the restaurant Clare had been increasingly unfriendly. Deep down, Dorothy thought, it was simply that Clare didn’t like her very much.
She never had; she had always held herself back from Dorothy, had been inexplicably wary of her. But she had never been as bad as this. Now she seemed to be doing it deliberately, to want Dorothy to notice—to make Dorothy feel somehow guilty. This was the last lunch she would have with Clare, Dorothy decided. And the last time they’d arrange to meet, if she had her way. She had been kind to Clare, because of all that the woman had gone through. Well, Clare had had her chance.
A sudden glittering beyond the window distracted Dorothy from her growing anger. Sunlight had flooded the city. A bus was passing, raindrops trembling on its roof; the sun scattered a rainbow among them, pinpricks of brilliant colour quivering in the wind. Clare watched too, and when the bus had passed she continued staring out of the window.
Dorothy glanced where she was looking. It was an old cinema, now a chapel. The marquee said, “Come to Me, all you that labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” After a moment Clare’s reflection in the window came clear. Two enormous tears were running slowly down her cheeks.
At once Dorothy felt in control again; this was a situation she could handle. “What’s wrong, Clare?” she asked gently.
Clare’s face stayed on the glass, a silent portrait of misery. Her shoulders began to shake; her mouth opened loosely, and Dorothy heard her sobbing. She turned back and forth on the seat, trying to hide. “What is it, Clare?” Dorothy said.
“Oh, everything,” she said indistinctly. “It goes back so far.”
Dorothy was about to respond when she caught sight of the clock. “Look, Clare, I’m sorry—I’ve got to go back to work in a minute.
Come to dinner tonight, and you can tell me everything.”
Clare drew in a long shuddering breath, interrupted by a sob. “There’s so much of it,” she said. Then she was rubbing her eyes viciously. “It’s all right, Dorothy. Thank you, but I’m going to be busy tonight.”
“Do it tomorrow, whatever it is. You need to talk, you know you do. Please come tonight. And promise you’ll tell me. Please.”
“You don’t want to hear my troubles,” Clare said, smiling to show she was over them now.
“Yes, I do. Please come.” Dorothy gazed at her. “I get lonely sometimes,” she said.
After a pause Clare said, “All right.” She sounded weary, rather helpless.
As they emerged from St. John’s Precinct the first drops of a new rain were feeling out the pavement. “I’ll see you about eight,” Dorothy said. Clare nodded slightly, unsmiling, and hurried away. Dorothy watched her small figure dwindling into the crowd. She looked aimless, like a lost child. In a few moments the crowd had engulfed her, and Dorothy could see only the taller heads. Now that she had been able to cry, Dorothy hoped she would be able to talk. Dorothy began to run, to outdistance the rain.
Afterword
This was my first completed novel, and if I was writing a preface rather than an afterword I would ask the reader to be kind to the book. Admittedly my earlier attempts are even more in need of special pleading. We’ll pass hastily over Black Fingers from Space, the opening and only chapters of which I wrote when I was eight, and there isn’t much more to be said about The Pit, a ramble after Machen I composed (hardly the word) without the advantage of a plot, in my twelfth year. It was intended as the first volume of a trilogy—which in itself would no doubt be sufficient to guarantee it a publisher’s contract these days—but it foundered after sixty pages or so, with nothing else to show for itself except the name of the trilogy, The Trail of the Narg, and the title I’d conceived for the third volume, The Broken Moon. The first chapter was enough to cause my English teacher to regard me askance and intone a warning about morbidity; and two years later some, to put it mildly, mild sinfulness in Murder by Moonlight raised the eyebrows—only those, I hope—of a Christian Brother at the same grammar school, St Edward’s. This was the second, less uncompleted, draft of a detective novel I’d written in emulation of John Dickson Carr and which included characters with names like Hartley Darwin and clues such as a life-size cardboard policeman found at the scene of a murder. Who done it, and how, I forgot long ago. The manuscripts of both drafts are in the Local History library in Liverpool for the interested to mull over.
&n
bsp; After that I wrote nothing but short stories, most of which saw publication, for fourteen years. Since the advent of the pulp magazines, this has tended to be the way writers of the fantastic and macabre have learned their craft before embarking on a novel. (These days more writers get their start in semi-professional magazines, some of which are unfortunately pretty bad or worse, and self-congratulatory in proportion to their lack of worth, and which seem unlikely to provide much valid editorial advice.) Learning to walk before attempting the marathon of a novel has considerable advantages, but in my case it began to assume the characteristics of a more elaborate form of writer’s block, in this sense: every day one fails to continue writing a story adds to the difficulty of doing so—at least that was my experience—and as my career progressed, every short story began to feel like a hindrance to my composing anything more ambitious. I did write a few tales which were stronger on plot and less reliant on atmosphere—’The Tugging’, ‘Dolls’—than my average, but ‘Medusa’, one of my lurches into science fiction which got out of hand and became a novella, rather soured me on writing at greater length. However, my old friend and American agent Kirby McCauley persisted in gently suggesting that I should have a go, and about halfway through 1974 I had an idea for this book.
I thought I had an idea for a new monster. As Steve King points out in his essay on the book in Danse Macabre, that wasn’t so, but it was enough to make me enthusiastic about developing the idea at length. (Steve also suggests that the book’s ‘slumbering, semi-sentient monster’ may be Liverpool itself, specifically Liverpool 8, better known these days as Toxteth—which seems uncannily prescient of both of us.) Developing it sufficiently for me to feel confident enough to begin the first draft entailed filling many pages of a notebook with bits of scenes and characters, then working the entire plot out in advance, then breaking it down into chapters in an exercise book and using that to index the notes so that I knew which chapter each related to. Since Incarnate I’ve relaxed sufficiently with the form of the novel so that I don’t feel the need to bind myself to a preconceived plot, and I think that even in the case of The Doll I eventually became aware that poring over the plot was a substitute for writing the book. Even that awareness didn’t spur me to begin, but in earliest 1975 I awoke one morning and thought of the opening line, and once I’d sat down at my desk to write it I found myself continuing to write.
The first draft took only five months, and I believe it shows, as does my inexperience. For instance, the description of the park at night in the chapter taking place on 4 September celebrates the greater scope which I felt I now had, but is largely irrelevant. Whenever I finished a chapter, I read it through the next day and called that the day’s work; I’m surprised I didn’t find myself blocked. (In 1973, in my early months of writing full time, I would read through however much I’d written of the first draft of the current story each morning before starting work, and took Saturdays and Sundays off. What a one I was for learning from my own mistakes!) Having rewritten the handwritten draft on to the typewriter, I sent the typescript off to Kirby and, I rather think, the uppermost of two carbon copies to the British publisher of Demons by Daylight, Piers Dudgeon, at the now defunct Star Books. God, was I professional. Piers sold the hardcover rights to Thom Tessier at Millington, and meanwhile Barbara Norville at Bobbs-Merrill bought the American hardcover rights, and I was convinced that my career as a novelist was assured.
I thought so until the Bobbs-Merrill edition appeared, in late 1976. I was in New York for the second World Fantasy Convention, in time to look for copies in the shops, though not to find them. (I still think that if I don’t find my books in a bookshop the shop isn’t buying them; whereas if I find them there that means they can’t be selling, though at least finding them gives me a chance for surreptitious improvement of the display.) I needed the encouragement of finding the book on sale in New York. Kirby had been disconcertingly reticent about reviews of it, eventually admitting that there had been one bad review and one mixed. He duly produced the Publishers Weekly notice—’…contrived plot … wooden characters … purple prose …’—and, having to some extent recovered from this, I asked to see the mixed review, only to learn that was it. As for sales, I had to spend a night of jet-lag and insomnia and noisy central heating before I ascertained over pre-lunch cocktails with Barbara Norville that they were, as she put it, dreadful. I have never been so grateful to fans, at the convention I duly attended, for making me feel other than worthless.
Nor were the poor thing’s tribulations over. A later review by one Bernice Williams Foley in the Columbus Dispatch spent three sentences giving away the plot twists (such, admittedly, as they were) before disposing of the novel with the line ‘Thank goodness, this distasteful manhunt is fiction’. Star Books did rather better with it in Britain, however, and Millington even received a request from a bibliographer for a copy so that she could list it in Books about Dolls and Doll-Making. Still later, the literary editor of The Times included it in a list of the silliest titles of 1987, along with (among others) Get More from Your Deep Fat Fryer, Seaweed: a User’s Guide, Taxidermy: the Revival of a Natural Art, and The Mental State of Stuart Women—none of them titles in whose company I would be unhappy to find myself. My title has indeed alienated some people, but I’m as unrepentant about it now as I was before starting the novel, when it seemed the only title for the book.
Despite its flaws and falterings, and despite/because of the title, the book has seldom been out of print, and the prices asked by dealers for a copy of the first edition have become increasingly unnerving—$500 was the most recent I’ve seen. I confess to a certain indulgent fondness for it, not least since I rewrote the scene of the death of Chris, originally a bathetic episode in which he hopped on a bicycle and immediately fell under a lorry, no doubt one reason why my friend S. T. Joshi, the American critic, declared the novel ‘very poor’. Since Steve’s Danse Macabre continues to encourage people to seek it out, I don’t mind seeing it revived. After all, it did persuade me I could write novels, and I think I’m beginning to learn how to do so.
Wallasey, Merseyside
5 December 1992
The doll who ate his mother: a novel of modern terror Page 21