The Killing Doll (19 page)

“You have to ask him to do it,” she said. “He’s not God.”

Yvonne nodded. “When he told me about my past, he got it all right, every bit.”

“Last night he did a very special ritual to make our father’s life take a turn for the better.”

“Oh, yes, poor man. Poor Myra!”

“You’ll see, things will come right for him very soon.”

They went downstairs and Dolly opened the front door. It was plain to her, inexplicably, that Yvonne did not want to go. She wanted to prolong the visit because there was something she wanted to say or ask. But she didn’t know how to and Dolly, who was unaccustomed to long periods of social contact with new people, or indeed with any people except perhaps the Collinses, was beginning to feel the strain of it. Yvonne lingered on the doorstep.

“You did say Monday?”

“About two in the afternoon would be best. Goodbye.”

As soon as the door was closed she regretted driving Yvonne away. Not that she was alone. Myra’s footsteps came across the hall, the heels clacking as if there were no haircord there but still the old uncarpeted quarry tiles. Dolly pushed past her and went into the breakfast room where Harold kept an
A—Z London Guide
along with the few books of his own he possessed.

“Silly old fool,” said Myra’s voice. “You’d think he’d have the sense to put those paint tins out for the bin men. To be perfectly honest, you ought to do it, Doreen.”

Dolly took no notice. She was looking Shelley Drive up in the index.

“They’ve got a great big house,” said Myra. “George’s father was a very well-known specialist. He left everything to George. They’ve got a sauna in their house and a swimming pool in the garden.”

Myra followed her back to the living room. Edith was already there, waiting. The Ivoire that Yvonne had been wearing was drowned in the pungency of lemons.

“You want to pin that silk on to a piece of flannel before you start cutting,” said Edith.

Myra gave one of her laughs. “Quite candidly, I think it’s peculiar her coming here to Doreen. With the money they’ve got she could go to anyone.”

Dolly sat in the window, stitching the neckline of the golden robe. They did not speak to her again but for a long time she heard them laughing softly and their footsteps as they walked about the room.

16

T
o celebrate the sale of Mrs. Brewer’s flat, on completion day Pup took Philippa out to lunch at the San Carlo, in Highgate High Street. After that they both took the afternoon off, a rare enough lapse for Pup. The people who moved into the flat were a woman and her two teenage daughters. Dolly sat in the window and watched the removal van come. It was raining and the men had to cover the furniture with sheets before making the journey from the van to the front door. The new neighbor was a woman of forty who still dressed in the fashion of her youth—long droopy skirt, scuffed boots, peasant blouse, and shawl—for like many of that Beatles generation she had never noticed that the trend had changed. She stood in the rain, getting wet, looking helpless, and presently Mrs. Buxton came waddling along under an umbrella with a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits for her on a tin tray.

The Porsche, drawing into the pavement, sent a spray of muddy water from the gutter up on to her fat legs. Mrs. Buxton said something to the driver. Dolly couldn’t hear what it was but it looked rude, and when Yvonne got out her expression was nervous, even distressed, though by then Mrs. Buxton, with Gingie under one arm, had gone off into her own home.

Yvonne made no reference to the incident. She was wearing a raincoat today, though one that was as elegant as and indeed very like a cocktail dress, being of black proofed silk, and with it a wide black patent belt and high narrow black patent boots. A shimmering of raindrops clung to her fine silver-gilt hair. She almost ran into the house.

“What a horrid day! I hate summer days like this, don’t you? Oh, look, it’s half done! I’m going to love it!”

Dolly didn’t want her making water spots on the silk. “Let me take your coat and hang it up.”

Yvonne’s manner seemed unnaturally bright today, almost hysterical. She tore off the coat like someone stripping off after waiting the whole of a long hot day to get to the water’s edge. And the pink-and-black striped dress she wore was going the same way. Dolly drew the curtains just in time to stop the removal men getting an eyeful of Yvonne in orchid bra and bikini briefs.

The bright green was right on her. Her white neck rose from it like a madonna lily from its sepals. She looked at herself in Edith’s pier glass.

“We can have the curtains back now,” Dolly said.

“No …”

“Well, the lights on, if you like.”

“I can see, I can see well enough.” She stood there, gazing at her own reflection. Something in Dolly—or perhaps one of the voices—warned her of impending trouble. Yvonne was so still, gazing at herself, but gazing as if she saw nothing, as trance-like as Mrs. Fitter. “I don’t want light,” she said, her voice growing more childlike. “It’s easier when it’s a bit dark.” She turned round slowly. “Can I take this off?”

“Let me. Mind the pins. You’re happy with it, are you?”

“Happy?” Yvonne gave a little light laugh. “Oh, yes, it’s fine, it’s fine.” She stepped into her own dress. “About not pulling back the curtains—I meant it’s less embarrassing like this. Do you mind?”

Again Dolly sensed trouble coming. Her apprehensiveness sharpened into fear. She shrugged and laid the green slip down.

In a breathless rapid way Yvonne said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said about your brother. All over the weekend I’ve been thinking about it, about how you said he could do anything. You said it was a science, a scientific thing, not like—well, clairvoyants and faith healers and that sort of thing.”

Enormous relief flooded Dolly. What had she been afraid of? Something to do with the nevus perhaps. That Yvonne, like Myra, had been going to give her advice about the nevus. But it was Pup she wanted to talk about. Dolly loved talking about Pup, she couldn’t have enough of that.

“You see, I’ve tried everyone. I even went to this fortune teller. I had my horoscope cast. I’ve been to my doctor and to a psychiatrist, I’ve talked to my solicitor and they don’t do a thing to help me, not a thing. They don’t
understand.
One night I phoned up the Samaritans, I felt so bad. Can I call you, Doreen?”

Dolly shook her head. She found herself saying, rather to her own astonishment, “I’d rather you said Dolly.”

“Dolly, all right. You don’t mind me talking to you like this, do you, Dolly? You see, you’re my last chance. Well, your brother’s my last chance. I think your brother’s absolutely amazing, I really do. All my life I shall remember the way he told me about my past life, he was marvelous. So you don’t mind me talking, do you?”

No one had confided in Dolly before. It was a new experience. You couldn’t count Pup describing what happened at meetings of the Golden Dawn. Her friendless existence had contained no sessions of girlish outpourings. No torch-carrying man had opened his heart to her, no elderly person complained of the neglect of children and the exigencies of living on a pension, no girl confessed sexual adventures. Her brother, she suddenly realized with a pang, was self-sufficient and perhaps always had been. Because of her lack of experience she had no idea of the prompting words required, the “Do you want to tell me about it?” and the reiterated “Go on.” She simply shook her head, unaware that a look of wonder had spread itself across her usually expressionless face.

“Well,” said Yvonne, and she looked away from Dolly. She looked at the ballet girl and the Chinese boy on the mantelpiece and then at the big old black and gilt Singer sewing machine. “Well, it’s George, my husband. He’s in love with someone and I don’t know what to do.”

This was mystifying. That anyone who had someone as beautiful as Yvonne could conceivably want anyone else was, for a moment, beyond Dolly’s imaginings. But intuitively now, she understood that she had to make some sort of reply.

“She must be,” she began awkwardly, “I mean she must be—well, amazing if she’s prettier than you …”

Her voice faltered and the blood tore into her face. The words had been terrible to say, they had been wrenched out of her, but now, for some reason, she was tiredly glad she had said them. Impulsively, Yvonne put out her hand and laid it briefly over Dolly’s. “You are nice, you’re a dear.” She paused, then gave Dolly a sideways look. “It’s not a she.”

“But you said …”

“He says he’s in love with a—a beautiful boy!” said Yvonne and with a little preliminary shriek she burst into tears.

Dolly gave a nervous giggle. Yvonne, drying her eyes, had repeated what she said and Dolly found herself without words. It was quite dark in the room now, the rain pounding on the windows, and inside the atmosphere had become very awkward and strained. It was the kind of atmosphere Edith had used to say you could cut with a knife. Edith and Myra were not there now, they had fled. Yvonne turned her face, impervious to tear stains, unmarked by the redness or puffiness of tears, towards Dolly and dabbed at her eyes with a lacy Y-initialed handkerchief.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Dolly said clumsily.

The delicate, thin shoulders shrugged. “What can anyone say?”

The only source of Dolly’s experience in such matters was the advice columns and answers to readers’ letters in the magazines she read, her only mentor the woman journalist who had advised her to go out and meet people and forget about her birthmark. But she did not draw directly from them.

“It’s not as if he wanted a divorce to marry this—this person,” she said.

“He would if he could! He says gay people ought to be able to marry each other, he says you can find actual ministers who’ll marry them, and if he can find one who’ll do it, he’ll marry Ashley Clare.”

“A form of marriage,” said Dolly vaguely. She had read this expression somewhere. Yvonne was looking at her eagerly, nodding her head. Evidently, Yvonne expected much from her and suddenly Dolly felt excited, she felt she was enjoying herself. The constraint had gone. The whole experience was so novel, so different. She felt she must enhance it. But how? “Would you like something to drink?” she said, uncertain of the proper form of words to use.

“Tea, do you mean?”

Dolly shook her head. Until the advent (and the demise) of her father’s second wife, Dolly had never had anywhere to chill her wine. She now opened Myra’s big Electrolux and got out a bottle of Blue Nun.

“How lovely! What a lovely thought! You are kind.” Yvonne actually clapped her hands at the sight of the tray with the bottle on it and two of Myra’s best wineglasses. “It’s just what I need!”

Dolly nodded happily. It was what she needed too. They did not raise their glasses in a toast. Yvonne could think of nothing to toast and Dolly was too used to drinking alone for such a thing to cross her mind.

“Did you know he was—” never before had she pronounced the word in this context “—gay when you got married?”

“I ought to have known. He was thirty-five and he’d never been married and that’s a bad sign.” The utterance of this sophisticated lore sounded strange in Yvonne’s baby voice. “Besides, he was so—well, old-fashioned and gentlemanly to me. Real men aren’t like that, are they?”

Dolly had very little idea what real men were or were not like. She refilled their glasses.

“I’d just lost my first husband. He died of leukemia, he was only twenty-two. I’ve had a sad life really, haven’t I?” Dolly nodded sympathetically, though to her it seemed a wonderfully eventful one. Once more the tears gathered in Yvonne’s eyes. “I was only twenty-one. We were babies when we got married. I felt terrible when he died and I met George and he was so kind to me and said he’d look after me. And you know, Dolly, I hadn’t got any money and George had this huge private practice apart from what his dad left him. He said he’d buy me a house anywhere I liked and he’d give me a car for a wedding present.” When Dolly’s eyes went involuntarily to the curtained, rain-lashed window, she said quickly, “Oh, not that one, I’ve had two since then.”

“He married you to try and cure himself,” said Dolly, sagely quoting her columnist.

“I suppose so. Of course, Dolly, it never worked.” Yvonne drew a squiggle pattern in the condensation on her wineglass. “I always knew there was something wrong. You see, I’d had a very passionate relationship with my first husband.”

Dolly didn’t want to hear about that. “What about this Ashley person?”

“I’ve never seen him, I don’t know anything about him except that George says he’s a beautiful boy and he met him in a gay club in Earl’s Court called The Ganymede.” Yvonne’s voice gathered speed and the words rattled out, rather like a toy train charging downhill. “And he’s madly in love with him and he wants to leave me and go and live with him all the time. He wants to sell our house and buy me a flat with some of the money and go and live with Ashley Clare.” On the long vowel of the surname her voice rose on a melancholy wail.

“Don’t cry,” said Dolly awkwardly. She put out her hand as she might have done to Pup.

Yvonne clutched it. She would have liked to throw herself into Dolly’s arms but the nevus repelled her. The nevus usually had exactly the effect on people that Dolly expected it to have. But Yvonne held on to her hand. “So—you see—your brother—he’s so clever—I thought—”

“That he could do something for you?”

“That he could make it stop!”

“But do you want a—a husband like that?” Dolly asked.

“I want my house! I want to be Mrs. George Colefax. I don’t want to be divorced and dropped and just thrown away for a—a beautiful boy! I just want your brother to make it stop. I can pay for it. He’s so clever, he can name his price, I know that, Dolly. I shouldn’t mind what I paid, I’m so miserable.”

Dolly said almost scornfully, “He wouldn’t want paying.” She poured the last of the wine. The rain had stopped. She drew the curtains apart a few inches and a shaft of watery sunshine came through the crack between. “Tell me what he looks like, this Ashley. Could you get a photo?”