The Killing Doll

by Ruth Rendell

  “Let me have the pleasure of seeing you home,” he said in his grave courteous way.

  “Would you?”

  “Of course.”

  Dolly was too preoccupied to feel much resentment. Besides, she wouldn’t be on her own, she would be in Wendy Collins’s car, so there was no need to feel nervous about “The Headsman,” as the papers called him. Of her mother she could not be afraid, though that gliding presence had in any case slipped away.

  The car dropped her outside the house. She unlocked the front door and let herself in. The house was in darkness and there was a draft blowing through from the back. Dolly hesitated and then she went through into the dining room where the draft was coming from and put the light on. The French windows were wide open and the breeze had blown Myra’s new curtains so that one of them had wound itself round the standard lamp and the other been caught up on the back of a chair. There were two empty wine bottles on the ceramic top coffee table, which Dolly recognized as from her own stock, an empty glass and one half empty, and on the floor by the window one of Myra’s sandals and a pair of black spotted tights.

  She closed the windows. She understood fairly well what had taken place and she shivered. The memory came to her very sharply of her mother in the white shroud and she seemed to feel again the damp coffin-cold hand. Somehow, although she knew her father was not really old, although Myra was quite young and what some would call attractive, she had believed the marriage had been made for convenience and companionship, what the French call a mariage blanc. Again she shuddered with disgust. On an impulse to admonish and insult, she stuck the heel of the sandal into the neck of one of the bottles and tied the tights round the other like a scarf round a snowman.

  When she had done that, she was breathing like someone sobbing. All the joy and comfort of the evening was gone. She went upstairs, opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a tumblerful. If only Pup were there to talk to, if only he had come home with her! She had never discussed matters of that kind with him, he had seemed to her too young and innocent, but now she would not have been able to keep silent. Pup, though young, was wise; Pup had great ability to console. Thinking of the couple down below, directly below her, lying in a drunken satiated sleep, Dolly took her wine and sat in the window to wait for Pup to come.

  Pup was in Hornsey. He was walking along slowly in the soft breezy late summer night.

  “My girl friend got the tickets,” the girl was saying, “and then she couldn’t go. Well, she chickened out, if you ask me. I thought I’d go though just for a laugh. It was laugh, wasn’t it? My dad’s alive and well and living in Slough. What’s your name?”

  “Peter.” Pup was digesting the implication of her last remark. “You don’t live at home then?”

  “Me? You must be joking. I share with two other girls but they’re away. They’re students and their college isn’t back yet.”

  Pup took her arm to cross the road and did not bother to release it when they got to the other side. She said she was called Suzanne. Her rounded golden-skinned arm was covered with soft down which for some reason had become erect.

  “You want to come in for a bit?”

  They had arrived outside a house not unlike the Yearmans’ but with a dozen bells by the front door. Suzanne’s flat was a very large room and a very small bathroom and a tiny kitchen. The overhead light failed to come on when she pressed the switch and she groped for the table lamp. Pup touched her arm, shook his head and put a match to the half-burnt candle that was stuck in a wine bottle by one of the beds.

  She giggled. “I’m going to tell you something. I waited for you on purpose. There was an old woman offered me a lift but I said no.”

  “I was looking at you all the evening,” Pup said. “I was thinking how beautiful you are.”

  “Were you really?”

  Pup put his arms round her and kissed her. He felt he did it rather well, considering he had never done it before but only seen it done by couples in the street and on Christopher Theofanou’s television. Suzanne responded so enthusiastically that Pup felt quite ill with excitement. What he would have liked and wondered if this was what all men would really like, would have been to tear all her clothes off and rape her in one minute flat.

  Impossible, of course. He said in a cool conversational tone: “I’ve got news for you. I’m an innocent virgin.”

  She stared. “You’re kidding.”

  “No, it’s the truth.” He smoothed back the dark curly hair, looked into her eyes. He let his hands slide to her shoulders and then enclose her soft full breasts. Pup had read a lot of books, including novels. “But I’m young and strong. You’ll have to teach me. Will that be all right?”

  “Wow,” said Suzanne. “You bet it will.”

  Dolly waited for him. She refilled her tumbler with wine. It was an hour and a half since Pup had parted from her to see the girl home. Of course the girl might live miles and miles away and perhaps they had had to wait for a bus and perhaps now Pup was waiting for a bus home. She might live in Wood Green or Hackney or almost anywhere in north London.

  Pup was so small and slight. In the dark or at a distance he might easily be taken for a girl. The Headsman might take him for a girl. Dolly began to pace up and down but she was unsteady on her feet, the wine had done that for her. Midnight, half-past, ten to one. Suppose he had missed the last bus? Would he attempt to walk? Dolly poured herself more wine. She wanted to scream out her terror that something had happened to Pup. He might be walking home, he might meet The Headsman or that gang that roamed the council estate.

  She longed for him. She began to count, one, two, three, when I get to a hundred I shall hear his key in the lock, I shall hear him coming up the stairs. Ninety-nine, a hundred … The house was utterly silent, the world was silent, even the perpetual traffic seemed to have ceased. Dolly fell on her knees.

  The Yearmans were not a religious family. God had not inhabited Dolly’s childhood or done much more than nod in passing through school RI lessons. She found herself praying to the specter that had swayed across the stage in Mount Pleasant Hall.

  “Mother, protect Pup and bring him safe home to me …”

  She would never be able to sleep. What was the use of going to bed? She finished the wine in the bottle, opened a second one. It was two o’clock. Another tumblerful finished her. She crept, she crawled, across the hall and fell on to her bed in a stupor.

  At 7:30 on Saturday morning Pup came home. It was a beautiful morning and he felt jaunty and light on his feet and full of joy. As he let himself into the house it occurred to him that it would not behoove him to show these feelings, so, with his story ready, nursing the secret knowledge of his date for six o’clock that evening—a story prepared to cover that, too—he came in a contained and rather diffident way up the stairs. He need not have worried. Dolly was still asleep. Harold was still asleep. Myra was awake and up and in the bathroom, taking aspirins, remembering what had happened. Her former lascivious feelings of exultation in sacrificing her beauty to gray old Harold had changed to revulsion, even shame. She pulled her bright green toweling dressing gown round her and tried to face the day ahead.

  The day ahead was faceable for Dolly when she saw that Pup’s bedroom door, which had been open when she went to bed, was now closed. Her head was pounding and she felt weak at the knees. Never before had she drunk so much wine at one go. She went down to the bathroom and had two aspirins out of the bottle Myra had left standing on top of the lavatory cistern. Her hair was all over the place. She damped it and combed it out and pulled a curtain of it carefully down to cover half her cheek. Instant coffee would help but she and Pup were out of coffee. She got her purse and key.

  Myra was in the hall, her face haggard, her hair scooped up and pinned on the crown of her head. The green she wore looked iridescent to Dolly’s morning-tender eyes, it was so bright. She pounced on Dolly.

  “Surely it wasn’t necessary to do that? I mean, go in there and shut the win
dow, yes, but my sandal stuck there like that and my—” Myra could not bring herself to say the word. Her face was red and working. Nor could she mention the doll. She had meant to, had planned to, but she couldn’t.

  “It was my wine,” Dolly said.

  “Well, agreed, of course it was. And if you’d been at home I wouldn’t have dreamed of such a thing without asking. I was going to put it back. First thing this morning, I was going to replace that wine and the fact is if you hadn’t gone in there to shut that window, which to be perfectly honest was no damn business of yours anyway, you’d never have known a thing about it.”

  “A person likes privacy.”

  “You’d better lock your doors then.” Myra had forgotten all about wanting to be friends with Dolly. She thought she could see in Dolly’s eyes knowledge of what had happened on the previous evening, knowledge and scorn, so she lashed back in the way some people do when their antagonist has a disability.

  “You don’t imagine doing your hair like that hides that thing on your face, do you? Frankly, Doreen, it draws attention to it.”

  No one, ever, had referred to Dolly’s nevus in any fashion comparable to this. She could hardly believe what she had heard. But she had heard it and she was aware that she would feel the full pain of it later. Blushing deeply, she turned instinctively away; humiliated, she performed the more deeply humiliating act of presenting her “good” cheek to Myra.

  “Pancake make-up would be better,” Myra pursued. She loved giving cosmetic advice, advice on clothes, on “making the best of oneself,” and in doing so she forgot her original malice. “Or even Leichner stage make-up, a greenish powder maybe. You’d need an expert in techniques for covering scars, that sort of thing, but that’s not a problem, I mean, these people do exist.” She put out a hand and lifted the long lock of hair. Flushed with blood, the nevus burned a rich purple.

  Dolly jerked backwards, pulled her hair out of Myra’s grasp and ran out of the front door. It was cooler this morning, quite cool and fresh, and the breezy emptiness of the street was like her own loneliness. She hated Myra, that went without saying, she loved Pup. Yet last night, simply by staying out, simply by not being there as he always was, he had taken a step away from her. Dolly felt colder than the temperature warranted. She longed for a friend to talk to. Why couldn’t a friend have come into the house instead of an enemy like Myra? When she reached the corner shop she realized she was holding her hair across her cheek, holding it with both hands, her shoulders hunched.

  Myra never said a word about the doll. Perhaps she hadn’t seen it when she went in to take the wine, Dolly thought, or perhaps if she had noticed it she hadn’t recognized it, vain as she was, as representing herself. One afternoon when she had nothing else to do, Dolly made it an emerald green jacket from a scrap of material left over from a client’s dress. Emerald had been a fashionable color that summer.

  The doll soon lost its companions. Miss Finlay bought one of the little girls with yellow plaits, Wendy Collins’s best friend had the Indian boy, and Mrs. Leebridge wanted the other little girl.

  Dolly took it to Mrs. Leebridge’s flat herself. This was in Camden Town, in a block not far from the tube station. Mrs. Leebridge, large, flabby-fat, frog-faced, was perhaps the only person Dolly had ever known who could be in her company without reacting in some way or other to her nevus—without staring at it in fascination and then quickly looking away or ostentatiously not looking at her face at all ever or darting swift covert glances. Mrs. Leebridge behaved with Dolly just as she did with everyone else, noticing her only as a sponge to suck up the stream of self-love and boastfulness which poured from her thick flapping lips and the almost equally effusive adulation of everything pertaining to Roberta Fitter.

  The doll was paid for, glanced at, then set aside and ignored. Mrs. Leebridge talked about how she herself had been privileged to see ectoplasm coming out of Mrs. Fitter’s chest and forehead in white streams. She showed Dolly photographs of spirit faces surrounded by ectoplasm and floating in the air and one of Mrs. Fitter in a trance with a long white tube coming out of her chest and a man’s face in a kind of balloon at the end of it.

  “I hope you’ll come to another of our seances, dear.”

  Dolly said she would think about it.

  “I hope you’ll do more than think, dear. Only five pounds, that’s nothing these days, that’s less than you’d pay to go to a show in the West End.”

  Dolly didn’t much like underground trains. You had to sit facing people and people in trains had nothing else to do but look at other people. But Mrs. Leebridge lived so near the station that it seemed stupid to hang about waiting for a bus.

  It was just after 5:30. She was a hundred yards or so from the station entrance when she saw Myra ahead of her with her red bushy hair down on her shoulders and wearing the very sandals one of which Dolly had stuck by its heel into the neck of the Asti bottle. George Colefax’s practice was in Camden High Street and Myra must be on her way home from work.

  Vaguely Dolly knew that Myra traveled by tube from Camden Town to Archway and caught a bus or more usually walked the half-mile or so home to Manningtree Grove. She disliked the idea of traveling home with Myra and she hung back a little until Myra had passed into the station and was lost to view.

  Dolly wondered what Myra would say if she warned her off wearing that awful emerald green. No doubt it was all right for Myra to give people unwanted advice but not for them to give it to her. By the time Dolly came into the station Myra had disappeared and Dolly did not see her again until she came on to the platform.

  There were a lot of people on the Barnet Line platform, though it was not densely packed. As usual, people had gathered themselves into groups, each separated from the next by a few feet, at the very edge of the platform. How they would know exactly where the doors would be when the train came in (for this was the reason for the mode of waiting), Dolly had never been able to understand. Myra was in the center of one of these groups in her emerald green cardigan. At some point between Dolly’s first sight of her and now, she had scooped up her hair in the way she often did, no doubt because of the heat—it was very hot down here in the tunnel—and had fastened it on to the back of her head with a large tortoiseshell slide Dolly had not seen before. It was interesting to someone fond of clothes and color to notice how a fashionable shade such as that green would occur regularly in every crowd, when you half-closed your eyes you could see dozens of bright spots of it against a uniformly drab background. It had been the same, she remembered, a year or so back when purple grape was “in” and during the months she called the “yellow summer.” Dolly herself was wearing a sand-colored coat and skirt, with a sand-and-blue-and-red check shirt and Pup’s amulet tucked away inside it because it did not quite “go.” She made her way through the press of people until she was behind Myra and within four or five feet of her. On the left of her stood a tall businessman in a chalk-stripe suit and on her right a plump elderly woman. Their bodies slightly overlapped Myra’s; she was a little nearer the edge of the platform than them. A bright segment of green cardigan, a scrap of green, white and navy check skirt, showed between their more sober gray and fawn, and this, as Dolly watched, was in turn covered by the slim shape of a young girl in the same fashionable green spotted with black. Dolly moved forward. The notice which announced incoming trains had lit up to indicate that the next one would be for Mill Hill East.

  It seemed to Dolly that everyone was staring directly ahead, reading for perhaps the hundredth time the advertisement posters on the concave wall of the tunnel opposite or, as in the case of the man in chalk-striped gray, a folded newspaper held three or four inches from the eyes. Dolly hooked her handbag over her shoulder and looked down at her hands. She turned her hands over, palms uppermost, and looked at them. Images filled her mind: her mother shrouded and gliding across the dark stage, the rooms she and Pup now lived in, a pair of spotted tights lying by an open window, an amorphous greenness on which la
y fiery hair. Suddenly she fancied she could smell lemons.

  The girl in the green with the black spots on it stepped a little to one side. Dolly had not exactly pushed her but had thrust herself behind the man in gray and rather to the right of him so that the girl was obliged either to move or argue. She gave Dolly a huffy look and turned her head away. Dolly was aware of two more people, perhaps more than two, coming to stand immediately behind her and the girl. They pressed against her, not pushing, but standing very close. She could feel their warm breath on the back of her neck. It was very warm indeed in the tunnel and sweat prickled Dolly’s upper lip.

  No one but the girl could have seen what she did with her hands and the girl had turned her face away in offense. Dolly held her now shaking hands at waist height. She could not see the train lines, the rails on which the wheels ran or the electrified rail between them but she knew they were down there, in the deep gulf between the platform and the concave wall. Last week, Pup had told her, the line between Mornington Crescent and Euston had been closed for two hours because someone had thrown himself on the line. Not in front of a train but just on to the electrified rail, and it had killed him. Of course, for good measure, if you wanted to commit suicide it would be a surer way to throw yourself over just when the train was coming in.

  The light up the track at the far end was green now, awaiting the coming Mill Hill East train. Dolly could hear it in the distance and feel the wind that blew ahead of it. She held herself perfectly still, her eyes on that bright, virulent, poisonous green, which was all she could now see, which had expanded itself into a great green field crowding all her vision. Her throat was constricted and dry. She unclasped her hands and raised them, the palms a spare centimeter from the green jacket, the woolly pile of it brushing her hands. The train burst out of the tunnel mouth into the station and Dolly braced herself to push.