The Killing Doll (2 page)

He had measured himself on 18 January and 18 February and each time he had grown a little. On 18 March he was five feet one inch tall. He bought himself a paperback he saw on a stand about how to do magic. Faustus had been able to make gold, conjure apparitions, perform feats of trickery. More and more these days he was identifying with Faustus, though a healthy skepticism went on telling him his new growth was just chance.

“I shall never get over it,” Harold said after Edith’s funeral at Golders Green. “She was all the world to me. I shall never get over it.”

Dolly got him a new biography of the last Tsarina out of the library but it was twenty-four hours before he felt able to start on it. He refused to sleep in the bedroom he and Edith had shared but moved into the other first-floor front one and said he was going to have
her
room kept exactly as it was. This was what Queen Victoria had done for Prince Albert when he died. Dolly had to make the bed up and turn down the sheet and drape one of Edith’s nightdresses across it, although Edith herself had never lived like this, had rolled her nightdress up under the pillow and often hadn’t made the bed at all.

Mrs. Collins, for whom Dolly was finishing a dress Edith had started before she went into hospital, said it brought tears to your eyes to see him. Entering the house, she had surprised Harold going off upstairs with a book about the Almanach de Gotha, had supposed it was the Bible and his destination his late wife’s room. Mrs. Collins was religious in a curious sort of way, a member, indeed a leading light, of the Adonai Church of God Spiritists at Mount Pleasant Green.

“He ought to come to us,” said Mrs. Collins. “She’s bound to want to come through to him from the Other Side.”

“She’s more likely to want
me,”
said Dolly through a mouthful of pins, going round Mrs. Collins’s hem on her knees. “You ought to ask me.”

“We do ask you, dear,” Mrs. Collins said. “We invite all human souls,” as if Dolly were some kind of freak who could just lay claim to that definition.

Pup got off the bus at Highgate tube station and walked home along the old railway line. In one hand he carried his school briefcase, in the other a plastic carrier containing the paper and paints and drawing pins and Blu-tak he had bought in Muswell Hill. It was July 18, a fine summer’s day. Pup wore clean blue jeans, a clean white shirt and a lightweight gray zipper jacket. Dolly would have liked him to wear gray flannels but Pup, who was easy about most things, insisted on jeans. Nor would he let her make them for him. Levi’s, they had to be like others wore, or F letter Us or Wranglers. He had come this way because he liked the old railway line but also to avoid the company of his friend Dilip Raj and certain others who went to his school and also lived in Manningtree Grove or its environs.

There were a lot of people on the line this afternoon, mostly children sitting on the parapets of bridges, but grown-ups as well: a young man who walked along kicking a can, finally kicking it over the parapet at Northwood Road and down into the street below, and women walking dogs. Pup paused to stroke the noble head of a Pyrenean mountain dog being walked from Milton Park to Stanhope Road and back. The sun shone in a bland, hazy sky and all the buddleia bushes were in flower, a mass of long purple spires on which here and there alighted a peacock or small tortoiseshell butterfly. They were getting rare, those butterflies now, but sometimes you saw them up on the old line when the bushes were in bloom.

Just before the Mistley tunnel he climbed up the bank through the long grass and hawthorn seedlings, the yellow flowering ragwort and the pink flowering campion and the paper Coke cans. He let himself in by the garden gate. Dolly was waiting for him, like a mother or a wife, holding out the unmarked cheek for a kiss. He kissed her. He would have kissed the other cheek, for he felt no revulsion. Dolly picked up a stone from the heap she kept on the window sill and hurled it at Mrs. Brewer’s cat.

“You ought to throw earth,” said Pup. “You might hurt it.”

“It walks all over my plants,” said Dolly, though there were no plants in the garden worth mentioning, only Solomon’s seal and enchanter’s nightshade and, in their season, some anemic Michaelmas daisies. “What did you do at school today?” Dolly often asked him this, believing it a mother’s duty to ask and forgetting he was sixteen.

“Differential calculus,” said Pup gravely. He had very little idea what this was but hearing that sort of thing made Dolly happy. He had begun, half-consciously, half-unconsciously, on a course of keeping Dolly happy.

“It sounds difficult. Is that what your homework is?”

“That and Finno-Ugrian languages,” said Pup, applying himself to salami, Cornish pasty, piccalilli, coleslaw and Battenburg cake.

Bags in hand again, he was going down the cavernous hall (the walls painted dark green to the halfway mark and pale green at the top like an old-fashioned hospital or even workhouse, the floor quarry-tiled in red and black) when his father let himself in at the front door. All the years of his marriage, the first thing Harold ever said when he came in was that he was worn out. Pup greeted him in his usual polite, friendly way.

“Hello, Dad. Had a good day?”

“I don’t know about good,” said Harold. “I know I’m worn out.

Pup went upstairs to his room. It was hot and stuffy and he opened the window. He took off his shoes. Today he felt no very great trepidation, for he could tell by the shortness of his jeans that he had grown, but even he had not hoped for five feet three. Five feet three. He was really growing and was no longer the shortest boy of his year. Dilip Raj and Christopher Theofanou were both shorter than him.

He put his shoes on again and took the drawing materials out of the bag. With the magic book open before him at a page of diagrams, he began to outline a crescent shape on one of the sheets of cartridge paper. He had four sheets of paper, one for each of the four elements, one to go on each wall of the room on the top floor he had marked out for his temple.

He was going to be a magician.

2

W
ill you make me a robe?” Pup said.

“D’you mean a bathrobe?”

Pup shook his head. “Come upstairs. I want to show you something.”

“I see,” said Dolly like a cross mother. “I suppose it’s that room you won’t let me go in. I know you locked the door and took away the key. Now his lordship thinks it’s time to open up, does he?” She tossed her head. “I don’t know if I can spare the time.”

Pup gave her his sweet smile. “Yes, you can, dear.” Sometimes he called her dear and she loved it. The caressing word melted her. “You know you’ll come. You’ll like it.”

“Oh, all right.”

They seldom went up there. Or rather, Dolly corrected herself as they climbed the last flight,
she
seldom went up there. Once these top rooms had been servants’ bedrooms, or so Edith had told her, but had anyone in Crouch End ever had servants? It was Dark Ages stuff to Dolly. There were five rooms, low-ceilinged, the walls all papered in strange faded patterns (bunches of pallid sweet peas of spotty mauve, daisies tied with blue ribbon on yellowish stripes), the floors lino’d, pink or fawn or blue, odd bits of furniture standing about, a bed, a pier-glass, a wardrobe on legs with an oval mirror. She ran a mop over the floors twice a year, flicked a duster. That was how she knew he had locked the door of one of the rooms at the back. It was strange having these empty, scarcely known rooms in one’s own house, as if it wasn’t one’s own. A shadow crossed Dolly’s mind. Sometimes she had these premonitions.

Pup unlocked the door of the back room. Dolly gasped. The daisies on the yellow stripes were gone. Pup had painted over them in matt black. The ceiling was red. Under the window Dolly recognized from its shape an old bamboo card table that had been in the sweet pea room, but Pup had covered it with a black cloth. Each of the four black walls had pinned to it a sheet of paper with a design on it. On the north wall was a yellow square for earth, on the east a blue circle for air, on the south a red equilateral triangle, apex upwards, for fire, and on the west a silver crescent for water.

“They are
tattwas,”
said Pup. “They are the symbols of the four elements. I’m going to do magic.” He could tell by her face what she was thinking. “Not conjuring tricks, I don’t mean that, not rabbits out of hats.” One by one, he took his books off the table and showed them to her: Eliphas Levi, A. E. Waite, Crowley. “It’s a kind of science,” he said, knowing that would get her. “It takes years of study. I think I might have a gift for it.”

Dolly said nothing. She had opened one of the books at random and was reading the words of an incantation so esoteric and abstruse, so protracted and complex, that it seemed to her a person would have to be an intellectual giant to comprehend it.

“You can forget it if you don’t want to know,” said Pup. “You don’t have to be in on it.”

“Oh, I want to be in on it,” Dolly said hastily. “If it takes years of study, d’you have to go to college?” She was ambitious for him; she didn’t want him to go into the business with Harold. This might be the answer. “What can you
be
when you’ve done it?”

Pup nearly laughed. “It’s not what you’ll be, it’s what you can do. You can get yourself what you want, anything you want.” Doubt and hope were mingled in Dolly’s expression. “So will you make me a robe? I want a golden robe with a black sun and moon and stars sort of stuck on it.”

“Appliquéd,” said Dolly. She suddenly realized he was taller than she. It must have happened very recently. She felt a tender pride in him. “Let’s go down and see what I’ve got. I’ve got a dress length of gold polyester I got in John Lewis’s sale that might do.”

Dolly was at the machine in the front-room window, stitching the side seams of the golden robe, when she saw Myra Brewer walking along the pavement on the other side of the privet hedge. Myra was going to visit her mother as she always did on Thursday evenings. Passing under the overhanging branches of the two ginkgo trees which grew in the Yearmans’ garden, she put up her hand and plucked off a handful of the maidenhair fern-shaped leaves. Myra was one of those people who are unable to walk under overhanging leaves without snatching at a bunch of them. Those Brewers, Dolly thought, including the cat among “those Brewers,” were always damaging her property. She banged on the window but Myra had already gone by. No one had hair that red, not even Edith’s had been that red, Myra must put henna on it. Dolly heard the next-door door slam as Myra let herself in.

“I thought you were never coming,” said Mrs. Brewer as her daughter made a pot of tea she wouldn’t put herself out to make.

“You always say that. You always say, ‘Aren’t you late?’ or “I thought you were never coming.’”

“If I say it, it’s because it’s true. You always are late except when he brings you in his car. Where is he tonight? Home with wifey, I suppose.”

Myra could have cried when her mother talked to her like that. It was all true. He was at home with wifey and she was thirty-seven and her hair looked awful if she didn’t put henna on it. She had been in the ladies’ loo at West End Green on the way here and there had been this graffito on the wall that said: “The quietest thing on earth is the sound of hair going gray.”

“It’s no good looking like that,” said Mrs. Brewer, putting cream in her tea the way she had done when a girl in Devonshire. “It’s no good getting down in the mouth. You can talk all you like about the second half of the twentieth century and all that but human nature doesn’t change. You should have seen the writing on the wall when his boys went to boarding school and he didn’t divorce her then.”

Myra said nothing. She had had enough writing on walls for one day.

“There’s that little bitch with the birthmark throwing stones at Fluffy again,” said Mrs. Brewer.

Fluffy was a long-coated tabby that Mrs. Brewer called a Persian. Sometimes he sat on the post between the Yearmans’ front fence and the house next door. Mrs. Brewer had the ground-floor flat and the people on the next floor and the people on the top floor all had cats, though only Fluffy sat on the post. Dolly said there were more cats in Crouch End than in all the rest of London put together.

“Well, there are more mice in London than people,” said Pup who knew about things like that.

Edith used to tidy up the front garden in the autumn, cut down the Michaelmas daisies, pull out the enchanter’s nightshade and sweep up the leaves. Dolly supposed she would have to do it now. Wearing the cotton gloves that had been her mother’s, using Edith’s secateurs and Edith’s small red-and-silver painted trowel, brought her mother most forcefully back to her. She could almost see her when she closed her eyes, that thin, pinched face, that fiery red hair, and smell the lemon verbena toilet water she used. The tears came into her eyes. She began furiously digging out weeds.

Fluffy came tightrope-walking along the fence, did his claw-scraping act up the side of the post and then sat on top of it. Dolly looked up at him while he was scraping and again when he settled down. Manningtree Grove was long and straight and fairly wide in spite of the cars parked nose-to-tail along it, and motorists used it as a through route between Crouch End Hill and Stroud Green. Cars went down it very fast, especially the ones driven by boys of seventeen and eighteen. Dolly heard a car coming as it bounded over the hump where Mistley Avenue went across. She knew what she was doing and yet she did not quite know; her intention was half-fantasy. She leapt to her feet, clapped her hands and shouted out. Fluffy jumped off the post and fled across the road.

Dolly heard the car roar by, without a pause, with no sound of brakes. It had been going very fast; they thought nothing of driving at fifty down there. She waited for Fluffy to come back, to scrape the post and then sit on it. She even selected a stone to throw at him. After a little while she laid down the trowel and got up and went down the path, through the gate, out on to the pavement and looked. Fluffy lay near the gutter on the opposite side of the street between the front bumper of a red Datsun and the rear bumper of a green Volvo. Dolly went across the road. He was dead, limp, though still very warm. A little blood was coming from the corner of his mouth but otherwise he was unmarked. The impact had killed him and flung him there. Dolly felt rather sick. She went back indoors and washed her hands.