Authors: Ruth Rendell
Yvonne said she would try. She would borrow or steal a photograph from George and get it to Dolly. Relaxed by the wine, she talked about where Ashley Clare lived, what he did for a living and, as far as she knew, what he looked like. Once or twice she called Dolly darling. It had been an eventful and exciting, even exhausting, afternoon, and Dolly, watching the Porsche depart up Manningtree Grove, felt so strung up by it that she had to open a fresh bottle of wine a full hour before Pup was due home.
For that evening he intended to spend at home. He had a date with Caroline’s friend’s sister’s boss at his house in Finchley at 6:00 and he was nervous. But he showed none of this nervousness to Philippa, and in spite of it, he did not leave her flat in Muswell Hill until five to.
Half an hour later he came away jubilant. He drove through Hampstead Garden Suburb in the Hodge and Yearman van, forcing himself to drive slowly and carefully, for his instinct was to be reckless. The sun was shining now and it was as if the rain had never been except that but for the rain the lawns would not have been so green or the flowers so fresh or the leaves so sparkling in the bright soft light. The large beautiful houses seemed to look graciously upon him.
Dolly was a little drunk by the time he came in. She was steady on her feet still but her speech was becoming slurred. Pup looked at her flushed face and at the empty Blue Nun bottle and the nearly empty bottle of Yugoslav Riesling but he made no comment. He didn’t want to antagonize her, he wanted to tell her what he had achieved that day. He had to tell someone. Harold would only caution him to hold his horses. Philippa was less interested even than Dolly and Caroline was a gold digger. He could have told his friend Dilip Raj but Dilip had gone to his grandmother in Calcutta for a holiday.
“I’ve had the most wonderful thing happen,” he said, coming across the room to kiss her, almost bounding across. “I’ve just been to see a man who’s going to give us a contract to supply his new offices with everything they need in the way of equipment—word processors, electronic typewriters, the lot—it’ll be an enormous contract. And he’s given it to me, Dolly.” This time, though she noticed nothing, he said “me” and not “us.” “I’m on top of the world, Dolly, and I tell you what, I’ll have a glass of your wine.”
She poured it for him and brought it to where he was sitting on the brown check settee. Pup, for the occasion, had been wearing his gray suit with the pink-and-gray patterned shirt and a slate-blue silk tie. He took off the tie and his jacket and sat there in his shirtsleeves.
“To us!” he said, raising his glass. “To the continued success of Yearman and Hodge!”
She looked at him. It was the look of a mother whose son is a wealthy rag and bone dealer but who would have preferred him to be a poor professor. “I should have thought,” she said, “you’d leave all that kind of thing to Dad.”
It was rare for him but he was suddenly furiously angry. He controlled himself. “He’s not a businessman. I think I am. I think I’m lucky enough to have a flair for it.”
She said quietly and dolefully, “I thought you had a flair for—you know what I thought.”
The only thing to do with that was ignore it. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll celebrate. I’ll take you out to dinner.”
She shook her head. “I’m tired. You know I don’t like going out to eat in those places.” He saw what she meant and he was powerless. “Besides, I’ve got your meal here.”
Salami, rolled turkey breast sliced thin as paper, cole slaw, potato crisps, chocolate Swiss roll, tinned peaches and tinned custard. He felt disloyal but he was growing out of that kind of food, the child’s dream of a feast. Harold was already seated at the kitchen table,
The Daughters of George III
propped up in front of him between his plate and the milk jug.
“Hello, Dad,” said Pup, who hadn’t seen him since the morning. “Had a good day?”
“I don’t know about good. I know I’m worn out.”
And this time he was. That afternoon at 5:00, sitting in the room behind the Crouch End Broadway shop, operating one of the new Olympia ES100s, he had finished typing his novel. He was reading
The Daughters of George III
less from need than habit.
Dolly poured out two cups of tea. She sensed it would be unwise that evening to tell Pup about Yvonne Colefax and her trouble. Wait a day or two, wait until next time he was home in the evening. She had had too much wine to feel like eating but she took a piece of bread and buttered it and made herself a sandwich with the sliced turkey. It was rare for Pup to be home two evenings in succession. She almost trembled when she thought of what that might mean, that he was growing tired of the Golden Dawn.
The ins and outs of why Georgiou came to lose the shop Diarmit never fully comprehended. Not that Georgiou, hitherto taciturn, had not talked of it all day long, grumbling in his thick harsh accent about landlords and rent acts and the iniquity to be found everywhere in the United Kingdom. Not that he had not attempted to explain, his voice snapping and crackling as he stumbled over difficult words.
“That place that sells the typing machines, they are after my shop.” Georgiou threw back his head and lifted up his hands. “Oh, nobody is saying but I have ways of knowing. Expansion is the word, expand, expand, that is all—everything—nowaday. Typing machines, photomachines, this is what people like today. Good food they don’t like, they don’t care.”
Diarmit smiled uneasily at him, mystified.
“So if that’s what people like,” said Georgiou, “let these typers and photoers pay the rent. Me, I don’t care, I retire. I leave this rat race for good.”
Once more Diarmit was on the dole. He had all the time in the world on his hands and no purpose to put it to. He was ashamed of being without work and even more ashamed to be seen to be without it by the other tenants of the house. They would think him no better than Conal, they would think that birds of a feather flocked together.
Of necessity he now spent hours in his room. If he went out it was never for more than an hour or so. He spent all night and most of the day in that room. The fact that Conal’s things were in it, were still taking up space in it, began to anger him. He put Conal’s clothes and the knives in the Harrods bag in the middle of the room in a pile. Whenever he moved about, he had to step over them or walk round them but he felt that at any rate he had made a gesture, he had made it plain to whomever might call or look in the window or somehow observe the interior of the room that those things were not his and had nothing to do with him. He stopped wearing Conal’s red clothes and went back to the denim jeans he had had on when first he came to take over the room.
Then it occurred to him that Conal’s sister Kathleen was a more suitable person to give her brother’s things house room than he was. He made them all into a parcel which he wrapped in newspaper and bound with adhesive tape. It took him nearly all of one day to pack and wrap that parcel, and on the next, a hot day in August, he took it over to Kilburn on the train from Crouch Hill.
A man opened the door to him. He said he was Kathleen’s husband and Kathleen was out at her work.
“She’s lucky then, lucky to have work,” Diarmit said politely. “I could do with work myself.” He had heard the man’s voice before, he remembered now, when he had made that phone call on Conal’s behalf. Cowardly Conal had got him to phone them because he was scared to. “These are her brother Conal’s things now that I’ve brought all the way over on the train. I’ve no use for them, you see, so you’d best take care of them till he comes.”
The man stared. “She hasn’t got a brother called Conal.”
So that was the way the wind blew. They meant to disown him entirely. Diarmit could not blame them but he persisted. “Moore’s the name, same as her maiden name. Conal Moore.”
“My wife’s maiden name was Bawne.”
Diarmit laughed. He couldn’t help it. The effrontery of it, the sheer nerve of skiving off out of your responsibilities by pretending to be a member of
his
own family! Bawne, indeed. He laughed humorlessly, tossing back his head, and he tried to thrust the parcel into the man’s arms, but before he could do so, the door was shut in his face.
Why had the man refused even to admit Conal was his brother-in-law? That he and his wife might want nothing to do with Conal, Diarmit could readily understand. But why deny the relationship and refuse to take in a parcel of Conal’s property? It must be because they had had word that Conal was coming back and they were scared of any involvement with him.
He was coming back … It was a year now since he had murdered that girl and cut her head off, since they had called him The Headsman and written about him in the papers. He was coming back because it had all blown over and he was safe. Diarmit climbed the stairs to his room. He unpacked the parcel and laid the red clothes out carefully on the end of the bed and over the backs of chairs. The knives and the cleaver were clean but he washed them at the sink and dried them and replaced them in the bag. Conal was coming back and might be back any day…
The letter was in a brown envelope addressed to Ms. Doreen Yearman and it was such as Dolly had hardly ever received in her life before, for it began “Dear Dolly” and ended “Love from Yvonne.” With it was a photograph of two men in a living room sitting at either end of a velvet sofa. It had been taken with a flash and both were blank-faced and stary-eyed. George Colefax was smoking a cigar but the other man sat with his hands rather girlishly folded in his lap. A beautiful boy, perhaps, though that surely had been rather a long time ago. His black hair, swept back Byronically, had silver wings at the temples and although the flash had obliterated lines on the forehead and under the eyes, you felt that they were there.
Dolly put the photograph and the letter in her handbag. Something impelled her to keep taking the letter out and rereading that “Dear Dolly” and “Love from Yvonne.” She was going shopping in the Holloway Road, walking part of the way there along the old railway line. It was a warm hazy day with the promise of great heat by noon and the grass was flushed pink where the rosebay willow herb was in bloom. You could hear the hum of insects in the flowers above the hum of traffic.
As she stepped inside the comparative coolness and darkness of the Mistley tunnel, it occurred to Dolly that it must be a year since The Headsman’s murder. It had been a Wednesday, she recalled, the day before Myra’s dinner party at which Pup had accurately told Yvonne the events of her past life. She, Dolly, had been out, making her first visit to a seance of the Adonai Spiritists. Because of that she could remember the dates, Wednesday, 12 August, Thursday, 13 August. And today was Wednesday, 11 August. A year had passed, exactly a year, today was the anniversary.
Dolly quickened her step through the tunnel and felt a certain relief at coming out at the other end into the soft warm light. A black and red butterfly flew across, an inch or so from her eyes, and settled on a spray of buddleia. She walked along the old station platform. Approaching her, in the distance, was the woman with the white Pyrenean mountain dog, the animal ambling indifferently as if a year ago it had never nosed out a corpse and then a human head.
T
he man in the photograph appeared to have an olive skin, so Dolly made the doll’s body from the kind of coarse unbleached linen that is called crash. There was a piece left over from Edith’s tapestry work. Dolly embroidered Ashley Clare’s face, the curved black eyebrows, the almond eyes, the red sensuous mouth. She sewed a headful of black hair on him but she used silk, not wool, and at the temples she stitched in fine threads of silver. Almost by chance she seemed to have caught the man’s expression. The face, she felt, would be instantly recognizable.
In the photograph he was wearing velvet cord jeans, a shirt open at the neck and a zipper jacket but Dolly wanted to see him more formally dressed as he must surely be for his daily work, whatever that might be. She made him a suit from gray polyester that had been left over from a skirt of Wendy Collins’s, a shirt from one of Edith’s lawn handkerchiefs, and a red silk tie from the lining of her own velvet coat. She painted his cardboard shoes with Woolworth’s Chinese lacquer. Complete, he was the perfect man doll, the best doll she had ever made.
Even Myra admired him. Myra and Edith had been there with her, watching her work.
“I must say, Doreen, it’s a perfect likeness. I saw him once when he came into the surgery. You’ve got him to a t.”
“You’ve made a very nice job of that, dear, but isn’t he a bit cross-eyed?”
It was rare for them to speak to each other but sometimes they did. “To be honest with you, Edith,” Myra said, “he
is
a bit cross-eyed.”
Dolly put him on the mantelpiece between the Chinese boy and the ballet girl. Making the doll had taken up all her time and she had done nothing more to the green silk dress. While she was stitching in the facings at neck and armholes there was a ring at the door and she was sure it must be Yvonne calling unexpectedly. But it was only one of the girls from next door with a pair of denims over her arm to say that Mrs. Buxton had told her mother that Dolly did dressmaking, so could she find time to turn her jeans up four inches? She saw the doll, said it looked like Robert de Niro and giggled. Dolly took the jeans and said she would have to charge four pounds and would that be all right? She could see the girl trying not to look at her right cheek.
Since the letter, read and reread, especially the opening and concluding words, there had been no sign at all from Yvonne. Dolly had never before known what it is to sit by a telephone waiting for it to ring, longing for it to ring. She tacked the green silk hem and began sewing it with fine slip stitches.
“Once you’ve finished that dress,” Myra said, “she’ll be off like lightning. You know that, don’t you, Doreen? She won’t bother with you. I mean, frankly, give me one good reason why she should.”
“It’s a difficult shade to match the Sylko to,” said Edith. “That jade is a difficult shade to match and a difficult shade to wear.”