by Ruth Rendell
“Ateh malkuth ve-geburah ve-gedulah le-olam…”
He was conjuring strength for himself to make something come to pass. What seemed irrelevant. Was there a limit to what could be accomplished? She put up her hand and touched the surface of the nevus …
“Before me, Raphael,
Behind me, Gabriel,
On my right hand, Michael,
On my left hand, Uriel …”
The walls were thin in these big houses.
Carrying the glass of wine, she walked back to the window. There were blobs and streaks of orange light on the walls and ceiling now and the sky was parrot-colored, scarlet and gray, with sunset. Up here Dolly felt herself cut off on a limb of loneliness. The room was stuffy and close and Pup’s voice droned behind the wall. She would have liked to break things, smash a window and shout out. Down in the street, trotting fast towards Hornsey Rise, came Miss Finlay, moving as she had done that evening in the winter, as if hastening away, without actually running, from some peril behind. Dolly had heard no more about the velvet skirt, wanted none of Miss Finlay, yet as she saw her scurrying along, going about her business whatever it might be, she felt a pang of resentment, of jealousy almost—though jealousy of what?—that Miss Finlay had no more desire to have her as a friend than she had to know Miss Finlay better.
Had she perhaps said something to offend her? Dolly thought back. Their conversation relayed itself to her from the whiff of lemon verbena to the parting at the gate. And then, her father and Myra in the kitchen … She had told Miss Finlay about Pup’s magic, mentioned it and his powers, and Miss Finlay had said something silly, something about sticking pins in wax images. It had seemed silly at the time. Dolly recalled it in detail. Circumstances alter cases and time alters them.
She had no wax. She would hardly have known how to handle it if she had. There were materials in the room she knew how to handle. She searched through the old fiber trunk, the cardboard crate in which she kept remnants and cut-offs of material. She went into her bedroom and fetched a pair of very light-colored tights that had a run in them. It was going to be a longer job than she had thought at first. For one thing she had never done anything like this before. She would need kapok and that meant going to the shops tomorrow. Taking a sip of her wine, she outlined a shape on the tights with French chalk, and then she began cutting.
When Pup came home on the following evening she showed him the doll. It was about fifteen inches high, a rag doll with knitted nylon skin and rust-colored wool hair and a face embroidered in lipstick red and rouge pink and eyeshadow green. The doll’s chest was the fattest and most prominent part of it. It wore a bright green blouse and a navy, green and white check skirt and round its neck and over the bulging chest Dolly had hung gold chains. In the ironmongers in Muswell Hill she had found some plumber’s chain, the sophisticated sort that is composed of tiny balls joined by links, the whole being of gilt rather than silver metal.
Pup laughed. “Our wicked stepmother,” he said.
“You can see it’s her, can’t you?”
“It’s exactly like.” He gave the doll back. “What did you make it for?”
Dolly told him. He looked rather grave.
“I do white magic.”
Even implied reproof made Dolly angry, even when it came from him. Especially when it came from him.
“You sold your soul to the devil!”
“Come on,” said Pup. “I was a kid.”
He walked out of the room and went into the temple and closed the door. There, having put on the orange robe, he began to perform one of the rites of the Pentagram, a Lesser Banishing ritual. It was of a kind specially evolved for the banishing of disturbing or obsessing ideas. Pup had been more and more afflicted with these lately and they had nothing to do with Myra or effigies of Myra.
Tears had come into Dolly’s eyes. She clenched her fists. After a moment or two she got her pin box and stuck pins all over the doll, into its legs, its body, its bosom, and its embroidered face. It had taken her all day to make, all last evening and all day, about ten hours’ work. She picked it up and hurled it against the wall.
6
A postcard came for Diarmit after Conal Moore had been gone for about three months. The picture on it was of the Cliffs of Moher in the west of Ireland. Conal had printed Diarmit’s name and the address. He knew who it was from only because one of the other tenants picked up the card and said, “It’s from Conal,” though whether she had said it to him, Diarmit could not be sure, certainly she did not look at him when she spoke, she might merely have been thinking aloud.
What Conal said on the card, Diarmit never found out. Perhaps something about paying the rent, for next day the landlord spoke to him and said Mr. Moore owed a month’s rent. This time Diarmit was in no doubt that he was being addressed, though he did not feel, so vague and fidgety did the landlord seem, that he was being spoken to as a real, solid, flesh-and-blood person but rather as a guessed-at presence or a shape just discerned at the end of a dark room. He paid the back rent and some rent in advance out of his accumulated Social Security. He had plenty of money; there was nothing to spend it on.
Conal’s postcard joined the note in his pocket. It puzzled Diarmit terribly as to what Conal meant by offering him that butcher’s job. It had been a firm offer, surely, but it had all been done by word of mouth, and now Diarmit could not positively remember if the name Budgen’s had actually been mentioned by Conal. Perhaps Mary had said Budgen’s as people say Hoover when they mean a vacuum cleaner. It might have been some other supermarket—Tesco, Finefare, Sainsbury’s, Spar, International, Safeway. Diarmit knew the names so well because he had taken to walking about all over north London looking for the supermarket where the job was waiting for him. It bothered him that they might have been angry because he had never turned up for it. He went into supermarkets in Holloway, Crouch End, Muswell Hill and Wood Green, wondering which it could have been but never actually asking, hoping that somehow, when he came to the right place, he would know.
He was an unobtrusive person, neither tall nor short, with darkish brown, dusty-looking hair, features that might have been roughly molded from putty with careless fingers, gray puzzled eyes. He had brought with him all the clothes he possessed: Hong Kong—made jeans and shirts, a thick gray duffel coat, a quilted nylon jacket. In a second-hand shop in the Archway Road he had bought himself a pair of dark wine-red cord trousers and he wore these most of the time with a dark red shirt which did not show the dirt. He carried the olive-green bag with Harrods printed on it in gold about with him in his other pocket (the pocket which did not contain the card and the note) in case he bought anything.
After he had been, for the third or fourth time, into Sainsbury’s at Muswell Hill, looking in vain for a butchery department, as if it might be hidden in some corner of the store he had not yet penetrated, behind the cigarette kiosk, for instance, or in the corner between the vegetables and the turkeys, he crossed the road and went into the big ironmongers where Pup had bought his magic knife and Dolly her gold chains. There he selected, as nearly as was possible in a domestic hardware store, the implements of a butcher’s trade: a steel cleaver for chopping and two long knives. The girl on the check-out was talking to a friend of hers and she did not look at Diarmit or speak to him except to say, “Seventeen pounds, forty-five.”
From Woodside Road he walked all the way back along the old railway line, carrying the knives in the Harrods bag. It was warm and sunny and there were red and black butterflies on the purple spires of buddleia between Highgate and the old Mount Pleasant Green station. Being in possession of the tools of his trade made Diarmit feel a little better. He would be ready now if the job were to present itself. How this might be he hardly knew, though he had vague ideas of someone coming to the door in Mount Pleasant Gardens and asking for him or of Conal coming back.
Back in the house, he used the pay phone for the first time. To do this was a tremendous effort for him, an act of will comparable in anyo
ne else to braving naked an icy river or confronting a savage dog, for by now he had gone a long way along the road towards a split-off from reality. It was as if one of those knives, grasped and held poised, was waiting to strike and cleave a great chasm between himself—whatever “himself” might be, for that was already fast becoming lost—and the natural, normal, real world where others lived their natural, normal, real lives. But he used the phone. He phoned his sister Kathleen in Kilburn, having held her number in his memory for many months. As the bell rang he trembled, he trembled as the pips sounded, for suppose he should put his money in and speak but Kathleen not hear him?
His five-pence piece went into the slot and he spoke on a drawn breath.
“It’s Diarmit, it’s your brother, Kathleen. I’m here, not far from you, at Conal Moore’s.”
A man’s voice. He hadn’t seen her for years and she had married since he had seen her. “She’s got a lot of brothers.”
“She has. I’m Diarmit, I’m the youngest. Now I don’t recall your name, what would your name be?” Diarmit went on desperately because there was no answer, “Are you there? Will Kathleen be there?”
“She’s at work.”
“She’s lucky, then, lucky to have work.” Diarmit experimented with a pleasant laugh. “I could do with work myself. When do you expect her back now? This is her brother, you see. This is her little brother Diarmit. Where is she now? Could I ring her at her work?”
“She’ll be home half-five.”
The phone went down. At least he had heard his voice, Diarmit thought, he had known who he was. And Kathleen really lived there, she lived in Kilburn, at where that number was, it was all right, it was true and real. Instead of going back into his room, he left the house again with the note and card in his pocket and the Harrods bag in his hand and went down the steps that had been cut out of the embankment to the old station. The rosebay willow herb was in bloom and the white campion. There were pink and white and yellow weeds flowering among the green grass and the rusty cans and the blown feathers. It was warm and hazy, it smelt of cow parsley and diesel fumes. Diarmit walked along the edge of the platform and jumped down and walked on the grassy bed where the track had been.
A woman was coming along with a white Pyrenean mountain dog on a lead. As big and incongruous as a polar bear it looked to Diarmit. He spoke to the woman courteously.
“Good afternoon. A lovely afternoon.”
She made no acknowledgment of this. Her eyes were fixed rigidly ahead. He spoke again, “Lovely sunshine …” and this time, as if to confirm that she could neither see nor hear him, she bent down and whispered something to the dog, fondling its head. He stood still, watching her go. She tripped along fast, hauling the dog behind her up the steps. Diarmit walked along the old railway line, swinging the Harrods bag, singing as he went like Bottom the Weaver who sang so that others might know he was not afraid. Diarmit would have liked to sing Irish songs but there were none he could remember, so he sang “God Save the Queen,” the only verse he knew, over and over, that others might know he was not afraid and for himself too, to know that the sound came from something and that that something was himself.
He got off the line at Stapleton Hall Road and walked to Crouch Hill Station. There was a real railway line there and a real train that would take him to Brondesbury near his sister Kathleen’s. It was nearly six when he got there. He walked along the concrete path and up the two concrete steps and rang at the door.
Kathleen had just come in from work and her husband had just gone off to work. Before he went, he had told her that her brother Diarmit had been on the phone, on the scrounge too by the sound of it, no work, on the dole, and hadn’t they had enough of her family, for God’s sake? Kathleen didn’t know what to do. She was tired, she was pregnant, and they hadn’t got a spare room anyway. And everyone knew what Diarmit was, going to Mary for a fortnight and stopping three years. He had been funny ever since that bomb.
For all that, she meant to have him in, she meant to talk to him and explain. It was the sight of him and the stink of him that unnerved her. He looked as if he hadn’t had a wash for a month and he smelt of old vegetables. Dressed in dirty dark red, his face pale like clay, a carrier bag over one arm and the other hand stretched out towards her waving a paper, he frightened her so much that she stood there staring and quivering for a moment in silence. She smelled his smell and the heartburn she had came up and scalded her throat. She pushed the door and shut it in his face and leaned against it, breathing hard.
Diarmit knew she had not seen him because he did not exist anymore. He had had that feeling before, that he did not exist, after the bomb in Belfast. But since then he had recovered his being more or less consistently, only occasionally had he doubted that he was there. Now he knew for certain he had become invisible and inaudible, no one could see or hear him and it had been going on at that level ever since the morning when he went hunting round Sainsbury’s for the butchery department. They had tried to take away his existence so that they wouldn’t have to give him a job, and they had succeeded if Kathleen couldn’t see him, if his own sister didn’t know him.
And now, as once previously, he was aware of how large the things of the world were. He felt very small. Most people, even children, were much bigger than him, buses and cars were enormous, seeking to mow him down, roaring at him, as he crossed Kilburn High Road. It was useless to attempt to go back by train. The man would not hear him ask for a ticket, even supposing he were tall enough to reach the ticket window. He would walk. Though it was a long way, six or seven miles, on this fine sunny evening he would walk. He felt the hard sharp edges of his knives through the green plastic and they comforted him. With them he would defend himself if the big people, not seeing or hearing him, tried to trample him underfoot.
Up in his room, Conal Moore’s room, he felt safer. He was like an insect, safe in its cranny in the wall but in peril when it has to run across the floor. An insect can sting feet with the knives in its belly. Diarmit held the Harrods bag close against him as he climbed the stairs.
Two people came running down from the top, laughing, making a noise. He flattened himself against the wall so that they should not bowl him over and sweep him down as they passed. Inside the room it was better. He made a pot of tea, he slept. But after that he began to feel besieged and threatened. He felt that his life was in danger; what ego he still had, which he knew he had but which the others, the Conal Moores and the supermarket people, discounted, that was in danger. During the day he was aware that the house emptied, it was a hive only by night. He went down listening outside doors for sounds of life within. It was entirely silent but for music coming from behind one door.
The Dalmatian and the mongrel collie ran about the green, scavenging from litter bins. They looked very large to Diarmit even from this distance. Next to Mount Pleasant Hall they were pulling down a row of old houses and the air was yellow and thick with plaster dust. Next they would pull this one down. Diarmit understood how it would be. There was no one in the house but himself and he was as invisible as an insect, so they would pull the house down around him, now knowing he was there or not caring. They would care no more for him than they would for the woodlice and mites and spiders and silverfish that also lived in the house. He would be crushed in the rubble, overwhelmed by a cloud of yellow dust. He sat in the window and trembled.
By night it was safe. The workmen did nothing after five, he had observed that. He could come back to the house at night and hide there all night but by day he must be gone, taking whatever he valued with him. He might come back and find that the house had disappeared but that was a risk he must take.
Next day, after they had all pounded out of the house, banging doors, laughing, crashing down the stairs, they made enough noise for devils in hell, he crept out with his knives in the Harrods bag. He carried them as a wasp carries its sting or a security guard his gun. There was no doubt in his mind where he was going; he had it all worked ou
t. Down the steps in Mount Pleasant Gardens and on to the old railway line where it spread out wide in a grassy valley, on to where it narrowed at the old Mount Pleasant Green station, and thence to the Mistley tunnel.
The tunnel was as dry as it ever got inside. It had an earthy oily smell and there were feathers everywhere. That mattress must have contained a million little white and gray feathers, for thousands had come out and blown away, had embedded themselves in the clay or adhered to the curved roof or lay in quivering heaps, yet the old torn mattress was still cushiony, still padded with down. Diarmit sat down on it and took his knives out of the bag.
From where he sat, well back under the curve of the roof, he could command a view of both the tunnel’s openings. He could assess what kind of a threat presented itself. As for himself, no one could see him, so there was no need to be hidden. But after a while he raised the mattress up on its side edge, making it into a curving wall which he propped in place with a roll of rusty wire netting and an oil drum. It was not for concealment but protection. He squatted behind it, as in a dugout or behind a windbreak, and it did protect him. Three or four people came through the tunnel, one walking towards Highgate, the others to Mount Pleasant, and although they were giant, lumbering, hostile creatures, their bodies nearly filling the tunnel space, none of them even brushed against the mattress and he was safe.
Diarmit understood then that he had found a way to live. Each night he could sleep in the room but by day he must come here, wary and armed, and station himself behind his barricade.
7
The doll, Mrs. Collins said, was exactly what Wendy wanted. No, she didn’t think ten pounds too much, ten pounds was very reasonable. Wendy wanted it as a birthday present for the little girl whose godmother she was. The doll was very obviously a little girl itself with a pink smiling face and yellow plaits and scarlet shirt and blue checked pinafore dress. Dolly had made several, all different, since the Myra doll and had had no difficulty in selling them.
