Dolly

by Susan Hill

‘No, can you?’

  ‘I wonder what you can do. Of course I can swim, one of my stepfathers taught me in … I think it was Italy.’

  ‘How many have you had? Stepfathers?’

  She did not answer, but moved away and followed a rivulet that led away from the main course deep into the fen. They looked back. Iyot House reared up, higher than the other huddled houses, dark behind its trees. The church rose like a small ship towards the west.

  It was very still, not cold. The reeds stood like guardsmen.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  But it was only a little further on when she stopped again. The rivulet had petered out and widened to form a pool, which reflected the sky, the clouds which were barely moving.

  ‘There might be newts here,’ Edward said.

  ‘Are they like lizards?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘There are lizards everywhere in hot countries. On stones. On walls. They slither into the cracks. Are you afraid of things like that?’

  ‘I’ve never seen one.’

  She faced him, her eyes challenging, dark as sloes in her face.

  ‘Are you afraid of hell? Or snakes or mad bulls or fire coming out of people’s mouths?’

  Edward laughed.

  ‘You should be careful,’ she said softly. ‘Mind what you laugh at. See if there are any of your newt things in there.’

  They bent over and, instinctively, Edward reached out to take her hand in case she went too near to the edge. Leonora snatched it away as if his own had burned her, making him almost lose his balance.

  ‘Don’t you ever dare to do that again.’

  He wanted to weep with frustration at this girl who made him feel stupid, and so as not to show his face to her, he knelt down and stared into the water, trying hopelessly to see newts, or frogs – any living, moving creature.

  ‘Oh. How strange.’

  Leonora was pointing to the smooth, still surface of the water. At first, Edward could not see anything except the sky, which now had patches of blue behind the white clouds. He looked harder and saw what he thought was – must be – Leonora’s face reflected in the water, and there was his own, wavery but recognisably him.

  Leonora’s red hair spread out in the water like weed, and the collar of her blue frock was clear, and a little of her long pale neck. But her face was not the same. Or rather, it was the same but …

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘Who is it?’ Leonora whispered.

  He could not tell her. He could not say, because he did not really know, who he saw or what. He reached out his hand to her and she held it fast in her own, so tight that it seemed to hurt his bones.

  ‘What is it? What can you see?’

  She went on staring, still gripping his hand, but even when he bent down, Edward could only make out the blurred reflection of both their faces upside down. There was nothing behind them and you could not see below.

  ‘You’re hurting my hand.’

  And then, she was scrabbling in the earth for small stones, and clods of turf, and then larger stones. She threw them into the water and then hurled the largest one and their images splintered and the water rocked and in a moment, stilled again and there they were, the boy Edward, the girl Leonora. Nothing else.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Edward said. But she had gone, racing away from him along the path. He watched her, troubled, but he knew he ought not to let her be by herself, sensing that she was quixotic and unsafe, and followed her from a distance but always keeping her in sight as she ran in the direction of Iyot Church.

  9

  ‘What did you see?’ Edward asked.

  He had found her wandering round the side aisles looking at memorial tablets set into the walls and brasses into the floor, running her hand over the carved pew ends and the steps of the pulpit, lifting the hassocks off their hooks and dropping them onto the pews, going restlessly, pointlessly from one to the other.

  She did not answer. He was worried, felt responsible.

  ‘I think we should go now. Maybe we aren’t allowed in here at all.’

  Leonora came to his side, smiling. ‘What do you think would happen to us?’

  ‘We’d get into trouble.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘The parson.’

  She shook her head. Her hair lifted and seemed to float out from her head, then settle back.

  ‘God?’

  ‘Or the devil.’

  ‘Why would the devil care? It isn’t his place.’

  ‘Do you believe in them?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Edward said. ‘Look – that is God, in that window.’

  ‘And there is the devil, at the bottom of that picture.’ Her voice was scornful.

  ‘No, that’s a snake.’

  ‘The devil is a serpent, which is what a snake is in the Bible. I know a lot about it.’

  ‘I still think we should go.’

  But before he could move, Leonora had taken hold of his hand again and was pressing her fingernails into the palm. She was staring at a large silver plate that stood on a dark wooden chest against the wall beside them.

  ‘What’s the matter? I think it’s for collecting money. You know, when they go round.’

  But she seemed not to hear him, only went on looking at the shining circle, her face pale as paper, eyes coal-dark.

  He got up and went to the dish. His own face reflected shimmering in the surface though it was distorted and hard to make out.

  ‘Don’t look,’ Leonora said. ‘Move away from it, don’t look.’

  ‘Why? It isn’t dangerous.’

  He was about to bend right over and put his face very close to the silver, when Leonora leaped up, lifted the plate and hurled it away from her down the aisle. It crashed against the stone flags and then went rolling crazily until it spun and fell flat in a corner.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  But she was gone again, out of the church, leaving the door wide open, and away down the path before jumping off between two high gravestones. The wind had got up again and was bending the tall uncut grasses and the branches of the yew.

  This time, Edward did not race after her. He was tired of what he decided was some sort of game which she would not explain to him and in which he had no part, but he also thought that she was trying to frighten him and he was not going to allow it.

  He came slowly out of the church and down the path to the gate. Then he looked round but could not see her. She had gone back to the house then. He would see her racing down the road.

  As he put his hand on the gate, the heavy wooden door of the church banged loudly shut behind him in the wind.

  Leonora was nowhere ahead. He turned, and then caught a glimpse of her, low down behind the stone wall among the gravestones. The wind caught the edge of her blue frock and lifted it a little.

  ‘Leonora …’

  What he saw on her face when she glanced round was a look so full of malice and evil, so twisted and distorted with dislike and scorn and a sort of laughing hatred, that he wanted to be the one to run, to get away as fast as he could, back to what he now thought of as the safety and shelter of Iyot House. But as long as she looked at him, he could not move, his limbs, his body, even his breath, seemed to be paralysed. He could not even cry out or speak because his lungs and his mouth felt full of heavy sand. Her look lasted for hours, for years; he was struck dumb and motionless for a lifetime, while Leonora held his gaze.

  But he was just as suddenly free and light as air and full of almost electric energy, and he ran.

  The hands of the clock on the church tower had not moved.

  For the rest of that day and several days more they fell under the spell of Bagatelle, after Aunt Kestrel had unearthed the old set and taught the game to them.

  ‘And if you grow tired of that, here are the cards. I will teach you Piquet.’

  But they did not grow tired. The weather changed and became hot,
with clear, blue skies that paled to white on the horizon and a baking sun. The streams dried, the pond was lower, the river ran sluggishly. The air smelled of heat, heat seemed to fill their mouths and scratch at their eyes. They went into the garden under the shade of a huge copper beech and set the Bagatelle board out on an old table. Mrs Mullen brought a jug of lukewarm lemon barley and the despised garibaldi biscuits and they played game after game, mainly in silence. At first, Leonora won. She was quicker and slyer and saw her chances. Edward was cautious and steady. At home he played chess with his half-brother.

  There was a small fish pond over which dragon-flies hovered, their blue sheen catching the sun, and the flower beds were seething with bees.

  ‘At last,’ Aunt Kestrel said, as Mrs Mullen brought in her coffee. ‘They have settled down together perfectly well.’

  Mrs Mullen went to the window and saw the table, the game, the boy and girl bent over the board, one fair head, one brilliant red. She mistrusted the girl and thought the boy a namby-pamby. Either way, having children to stay in the house had not altered her opinion, except to harden it against them.

  ‘I agree with you that Leonora behaved very badly, but we have to forgive her. It is all so strange and odd for them. Don’t bear a grudge, Mrs Mullen.’

  After the housekeeper had gone out of the room, Kestrel sat thinking about her, wondering why she was so very hostile, so clearly unable to warm to either child in any way, so readily seeing the bad and fearing worse. She knew little of her background and former life, other than that she had no children and her husband worked as a bargeman. Why she was so embittered she could not fathom.

  The heat continued until the air grew stale and every morning was more oppressive than the last. The sun filmed over with a haze and midges jazzed above the waterways.

  ‘Time we had a storm,’ Aunt Kestrel said over supper at the beginning of the third week of heat.

  Edward looked apprehensive. Leonora, on the other side of the table, saw his face and frowned. The previous day he had beaten her three times at Bagatelle and now she played with an angry concentration, determined to win and breathless with silent fury when, time after time, she did not.

  The heat formed a heavy cloud that hung low over the garden, obscuring any sun. Edward’s skin itched inside his clothes.

  ‘Let’s stop.’

  ‘No. I have to win first.’

  ‘You can win another time. It’s too hot.’

  ‘Stupid. I said I want to win first, then we can stop.’

  ‘You might not win for another ten games. I’m going to read indoors by the window.’

  In a single flash of movement, Leonora stood up, overturned the Bagatelle board, sending it flying onto the grass and scattering its pieces, and then she screamed, a terrible, violent scream, so loud that Edward ran from her and from the awful sound of it, across the garden, up the steps and into the house, slamming the heavy door behind him.

  Mrs Mullen was in the shadows of the hall, making him start.

  ‘I said everything would be turned upside down and we would have nothing but upset and disturbance, but never did I expect what came here.’

  Edward dared not move.

  ‘Listen to it.’

  She was still screaming without apparently needing to pause for breath.

  ‘It will turn you as well. In the end, there’ll be not a pin to put between you. Can you not feel it?’

  ‘Feel it?’ Edward could scarcely hear his own voice speaking into the dark hall.

  ‘What possesses her? Can you not feel it creeping over you too? No child could come within sight of her and not be turned.’ She came out of the shadows and went smartly to the door, turned the key and slid the bolt.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Shutting the door against her,’ Mrs Mullen said. ‘Now you get off upstairs out of the sight and sound of her while you’ve a chance.’

  ‘But how will she get in?’

  ‘Maybe she won’t and that would be no bad thing.’

  She left him.

  For several minutes, Edward stood wondering what he should do but in the end, after listening for any sound of Mrs Mullen’s return, he went to the drawing room, in which they had only been allowed to step once and where there were French windows opening onto the side terrace and the wide stone steps to the garden below. The air was sultry, the sky gathering into a yellowish mass like a boil over the house. He went to where they had been sitting earlier. The Bagatelle was still scattered over the grass and the table upturned.

  ‘Ah, she’s sent the good little boy to tidy up.’ He spun round. Leonora had appeared from nowhere and was standing a few yards from him.

  ‘I came to find you. She locked the door to keep you out but she shouldn’t have done that. I think there is going to be a storm.’

  ‘Are you frightened of storms?’

  ‘No. But you might have been.’

  Leonora laughed the dry little laugh ‘I’m not afraid of anything at all.’

  ‘You were frightened of something. You were frightened of something down in the water.’

  She lunged forward, grabbed his arm and bent it backwards so that he cried out. ‘You must never ever say that again and I didn’t see anything and I was not afraid. I am never afraid. Say it. “Leonora is never afraid.”’ She twisted his arm a little further back.

  ‘Leonora is never afraid let go of my arm you’re hurting.’

  ‘Manners, little boy. “Please.”’

  ‘Please.’

  She almost tossed his arm away from her, turned and went round to the side of the house. Edward followed her, angry that he had bothered to worry about her and feel worried enough to come and find her.

  She ran up the steps, and through the French windows which he had left ajar, but as he came up behind her, shut them quickly and turned the key. Then she stood, her face close to the glass, looking out at him, smiling.

  10

  Edward woke when his room flared white and then for a split second, vivid blue. The thunder came almost simultaneously, seeming to crack the attic roof open like an axe splitting a log. He sat up watching it through the curtainless window for a while, until hail spattered so fiercely onto the glass that sudden light and sudden dark were all he could see. He lay down and listened. He had been two or three years old when his half-brother had taken him on a boat and out to sea; they had huddled together in the small cabin as a storm flared and crashed all round them. His brother had been bright-eyed with excitement and Edward had sensed that this was something to revel in, knowing no danger, only the drama and heightened atmosphere. He had loved storms from then, though there had never been one so momentous. Now, this was almost as good, vast and overpowering across the fens and around Iyot House.

  The lightning flickered vividly across the sky again and in the flash, he saw Leonora standing in the doorway of his room, her eyes wide, face stark white.

  Edward sat up. ‘It’s amazing! I love storms.’

  She went to his window. ‘Yes.’ She spoke in a whisper, as if she were afraid speaking aloud might change it.

  Edward got up and stood beside her.

  ‘You should see the storms in the East. A storm across the water in Hong Kong. A storm over the mountains. They race through your blood, such storms.’

  He understood her at once and for the first time they shared something completely, bound up together in the excitement and pleasure of the storm, so that he clasped hold of her hand when a thunderclap made the house shake and the walls of the attics shudder and her nails dug into his palm at a blue-green zigzag of lightning.

  ‘I thought you would be crying,’ Leonora said, glancing at him sideways.

  ‘Oh no, oh no!’

  ‘We could go out.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, it’s like a monsoon, we’d be soaked in a minute.’

  ‘Have you been in a monsoon? I have. The earth steams and you could boil a pan of water on the ground. It brings down whole trees.�
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  ‘I want to go there.’

  They were linked in a passion to soar from this storm to that one.

  ‘My mother is there now,’ Leonora said.

  ‘Where? In a monsoon?’

  ‘In India, I think. Or Burma. Or perhaps she is back in Hong Kong. They move about so.’

  He was unsure whether to be envious or sorry for her.

  ‘When will she come back for you?’

  Leonora shrugged and flicked her hair about her shoulders. The storm was receding, the lightning moving away to the east and the sea, the rain easing to a steady, dull downpour.

  ‘I hope she’ll come before too long,’ Edward said. ‘You must miss her very much.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Leonora said, ‘and I don’t.’ And sailed out of the room on her bare and silent feet.

  The next morning, the parcels began to arrive. There were two, one very large, one small, and after that, as the post from abroad caught up, one or two almost every day. Leonora took them upstairs, ignoring the remarks made by Mrs Mullen about spoilt children and the concern of Aunt Kestrel that perhaps some should be put away until later.

  ‘They are my parcels,’ she said, dragging a heavy one behind her, refusing help.

  ‘But you,’ she said to Edward, ‘may look if you like.’

  Most of the parcels contained clothes, few of which fitted, dresses made of bright silk embroidered with gold thread and decorated with little mirrors, trailing fine scarves and long skirts with several floating panels. Leonora glanced at each one, held it up to herself, then tossed it away, to fall on the floor or her bed. Once or twice she put on a scarf and twirled round in it and kept it on. There were silver boxes and carved wooden animals, brass bells and on one day a huge box of pale green and pink Turkish delight that smelled of scent and sent a puff of white sugar into the air when she lifted the wooden lid. They ate several pieces, one small, sticky bite at a time, and the intense sweetness set their teeth on edge.

  ‘My mother never sends what I really want. She just doesn’t.’

  ‘But the sweets are nice. What do you really want?’

  ‘One thing.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘And she knows and she never sends it.’