The doll who ate his mother: a novel of modern terror Read online

  Clare turned at a film library that looked like a corner shop. A willow swept past on her right. Silence settled on the street a hundred yards down, except for Ringo’s whirring. Ragged tousled gardens rolled by; trees and low walls were painted with moss. A shampooed poodle and a lion gazed from the window of a flat.

  “Edmund hadn’t even mentioned you to George,” she told Chris. “I rang George to thank him for the invitation. He’s decided he may help Edmund after all. Well, I told him about you, and he said you must come to dinner too.” She drove slowly, gazing at the street plaques. “I don’t understand Edmund,” she said. “He seemed grateful when I told him how you’d helped.”

  “Yeah, well,” Chris said. “So it goes.”

  That was from a book Rob had liked. “I think you’ll like George,” she said. “And I bet his wife’s nice.”

  The three-storey terraces passed, their front doorways buttoned with strips of doorbells; Dylans, singers or dazed stuffed rabbits, gazed from posters through windows. At the end of the street the park opened out with a flourish of trees, making room for a sky that was largely covered by twin wings of white cloud. Ah, Hampstead Road. Clare turned right, and there was the Pughs’ house.

  It was one of a terrace. Its front bay was held back from the pavement by a low wall, painted crimson. The front door was painted orange, as were bricks around the windows; the curtains, beyond which George stood up as he caught sight of her, were orange and red. All of the colours still looked quite bright. Through the curtains Edmund turned to wave, faintly amused again.

  The front door jammed briefly. “This is Chris,” Clare said. “This is George.” George gazed at her quizzically, and she took the risk. “Like my guitar,” she said.

  “She always says that. Come and meet the wife. Alice!”

  It was a long thin house. A door opened far down it; sunlight fell out. “This is Clare. And Chris,” George called. “My wife, Alice.”

  She stepped forward from her blur in the box of light. Beneath slightly greying hair her face was wide-mouthed, smiling; her bright eyes wrinkled, they’d had some wrinkles already. Her hips were wide; children had taken the shape from her breasts. Under her apron her summer suit was rather old-fashioned, clean but faded. Clare liked her at once. “It’s nice to meet both of you,” she said with a laugh that went with the smile. “Excuse me if I don’t shake hands, mine are greasy. I’ll come through to chat with you soon.”

  “Oh, Alice,” Clare said. “I’m awfully sorry, I completely forgot to say Chris was vegetarian.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Do you eat eggs, Chris? Well then, no problem. I expect you’re fond of animals? You’ll enjoy yourself here, then. It’s a menagerie.”

  So it seemed. In the front room, which was two rooms run together, a cat sat looking fat and lazy, waiting for a nearby fly. Fish gaped at the air or shook themselves into golden glides. A rabbit’s black and white nose ventured over the arm of a chair, twitching its pink Y. Two children were calming the rabbit.

  “Look at Flopsy. You scared her,” the girl (twelve years old?) said.

  “There you are,” Edmund said to Clare, leaning back expansively. Dozens of tiny daggers on pink cloth bulged tightly over his stomach. “Come in, come in,” he said.

  George poured her a sherry. “No, thank you,” Chris said. “A glass of milk would be really nice.”

  “I’m Olivia,” the girl said, admiring his patchwork trousers. “I’ll get you some milk.”

  “Don’t you drink beer either?” Edmund demanded, faintly amused. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with a man for not drinking,” George said. “O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!” And it’s Iago who contradicts him. You were saying you came from Liverpool, Ted.”

  “Do you want to hold our Flopsy?” the boy (eleven?) said to Chris.

  “Yeah.” But the rabbit had hardly been dumped on his lap when she leapt off and thumped the floor with her back legs, growling. “Don’t do that, Mark,” Olivia said, returning with the milk. “She won’t be comfortable with so many strangers.”

  “Oh, all right,” Mark said grumpily. He looked at Chris and brightened. “Do you like astronomy?” he said.

  Clare remembered not to grin secretively at Chris. “Do you remember the trams going along the middle of the carriageways?” George was saying to Edmund. “And the overhead railway along the dock road? Did you used to go to the pictures all over town? I did when I was a lad, in case my parents didn’t book them. And then when I came into the business, my friends would let me watch their shows. I’ll never forget some of those places.” The rabbit galloped around the room, twisting in mid-leap to come down backward. “The Mere Lane, where they never turned the lights on—I never saw what it looked like properly. And the Essoldo Litherland, where they’d start the film before they opened the doors. And oh, the Winter Gardens in Waterloo, where they put on all the old Hammer films for their last week and let all the little kids in. I suppose they felt they had nothing to lose. It did the kids no harm; they chased about and only sat down for the monsters. Ah, those old theatres. They may have better projection today, but they’ve lost the personality. Don’t you have memories of Liverpool?”

  “I suppose there are good things about the place,” Edmund said. “If you’re a pop singer or one of these Liverpool poets. But it’s no use to anyone in my line of business. You have to sever all ties and go where the money is. And that’s London.”

  “Do your parents still live here?” Clare said.

  “Yes, in Aigburth. I bought them dinner last night,” he said, gazing at Clare as if she should have let him take her. “Oh, I must tell you,” he said to George. “There was this incredible queer at the next table that some poor sod had had to buy dinner. An actor, he sounded like.”

  Clare faded out the anecdote. Chris was admiring a Japanese doll which Olivia had handed him.

  “And he stood up and said, “Oh I can’t eat this, I can’t. Please, please take it away. Seems to me,” Edmund ended loudly, “if you’re invited to dinner you ought to eat what you’re given.”

  “If I’m cooking,” Clare said sharply, “I like to know people will enjoy it.”

  “That’s amazing,” Chris said, handing back the doll. There was an awkward silence. “That’s where Flopsy pees,” Mark shouted, unaware that his voice needn’t compete. “In that box. She used to pee on everyone.” He looked up at the silence, confused.

  Clare smiled at him. “Right,” Chris said, and Alice opened the door. “Come and get it,” she called.

  Beyond the long dining table a tap ticked in the metal sink; Alice tightened it. A pudding in a tin raised itself feebly from a pan of boiling water and fell back, fell back, fell. Alice carried over bowls of homemade chicken soup; George opened bottles. “We must thank Ted for the wine,” he said.

  “Thank you, Ted,” the children said in chorus.

  “Oh, it was nothing. The least I could do. Pass the salt.”

  Olivia was reaching for the cruet when Alice said, “Let’s just say grace first, Olivia.”

  She and the children whispered. George bowed his head, but Clare could see it was a token gesture. Chris smiled at her across the table; next to her she sensed Edmund’s impatience.

  “Would you like some grapefruit juice?” Alice asked Chris.

  “That’d be fantastic. Thank you.”

  “Actually, it’s quite real. Not at all fantastic.”

  “Olivia!” Alice said.

  “Well, that’s what our teacher said when I said something was fantastic.”

  Edmund slurped the last of his soup. “That’s something wrong with Liverpool,” he told George. “The food. I haven’t had a really good meal since I got back—apart from this, I mean. Last night they tried to say they couldn’t cook Steak Diane at the table. I soon sorted that out, I can tell you. And told them how much brandy to use. That looks good,” h
e said as Alice hurried over with a steaming casserole of shepherd’s pie.

  “Chef’s special for you,” Alice told Chris, and watched approvingly as he ate a large omelette and salad. “Is it fun acting?” she said.

  “Right. It really is. Half the time I’m just doing my own thing, being myself, you know. I reckon I’m most myself when I’m acting. Whoever myself is.”

  “Have you played Shakespeare?” George said.

  “Yes, at school. I’m not really into that kind of acting. I do more improvisation.”

  “Oh, George,” Alice said. “You and Shakespeare.”

  “Show me a greater playwright and I’ll buy you a yacht. It’s true, though, isn’t it?” he said to Chris. “Everything is in Shakespeare. He makes you feel things as if you’ve never felt them before. Whatever it is, he says it best. You describe a book to me, I’ll show you the story in Shakespeare.”

  “There’s a few he didn’t write,” Edmund said.

  “All the ones that are worth writing, he wrote. All the films I used to show had Shakespeare stories. That was when they bothered with stories. My father acted most of the plays locally,” he told Chris. “He used to rehearse with us, so I knew half of it by heart when I was Mark’s age.”

  Clare glanced at Mark. He frowned at his fork, as if it were a problem in mathematics (astronomy, rather). He smiled shyly to himself when the adults laughed; if he understood the joke he looked up, laughing, and was his mother.

  “Then I fell in love with the pictures. I remember looking forward to managing one of my parents’ cinemas. I wanted to give people what the pictures gave me, take them out of themselves, make them feel things they’d never feel otherwise. The pictures were magic to me. They still are, sometimes.” He poured more wine. “Of course I didn’t know then how much work goes into running a cinema. But sometimes when I talk to people coming out of the film, the magic’s there.”

  “Yes, I’ve finished, thank you. That was very good,” Edmund said; his plate was still half full. “Only when you talk to people?” he asked George. “Not when you watch the films?”

  “They aren’t making films for me any more. Oh, a few. But I’m not there to please myself.” Alice was serving tinned pudding to the children, fruit and cream to the adults. “The thing I had last week, supposed to be a horror film,” George said. “It was horrible all right. About an actor who kills off his critics. I wouldn’t have minded, but he was a Shakespearean actor, supposed to be copying his behaviour from Shakespeare. There was one,” he said to Chris, “where he cooks up a man’s pet dogs and makes him choke on them. Oh, I’m sorry,” he said as Clare froze. “My table manners aren’t all they should be.”

  “It isn’t that,” Chris said. “I think Clare’s worried because the man Edmund’s hunting ate my cat.”

  George slapped his forehead. “God in heaven. I am a very foolish fond old man, or I might as well be. I’m sorry. One day I’ll learn to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Shit, no. It doesn’t matter. Clare told me about your mother and her dog.”

  “_Ate_ your cat?” Mark said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s enough, Mark,” Alice said.

  “But I want to hear about who ate his cat.”

  “No, you don’t. And I’m sure nobody wants to talk about it, either.”

  Into the silence Edmund said, “It’s presents time.” He took several books from his attache case. “I thought you should know what my books are like, since you’re going to be in one. Here you are, Clare. I wrote that one with ladies in mind.”

  Love Has Many Weapons. The heart has its reasons for murder, and here’s Edmund Hall with a dozen of the best. Opposite the blurb Edmund had written “To Clare, who still owes me a dinner date.” The row of kisses might almost have been stylized graves. She wondered if he meant her to remember the awkward scene in his hotel room.

  “I couldn’t leave you out, Alice. That’s one for the ladies too.” He dealt her The Homicidal Heart. “Here’s George’s. That’ll give you some good dreams.” He winked at George, who stared at Sinister Sirens. “Oh, I didn’t know you were coming,” Edmund said to Chris.

  “‘Was ever book so fairly bound?’” George said. “I’ve left a bit out of that. Never mind. Thank you, Ted.”

  “About my book—there’s something I wanted to say while we’re all together. It would be heartless of me not to put in something about your loved ones. Well, you’re the ones who can tell me what to put. But it isn’t the sort of thing I should take notes of. Write it down for me, anything you want to say. Oh, Clare, can you tell me where I can contact your sister-in-law?”

  “Dorothy? I’ll ask her if she wants to get in touch with you.”

  “Sell me to her as hard as you can. Now there’s one more thing. I expect this book to make me a lot of money. Jesus.”

  The rabbit had been rubbing her chin on his attache case; now she was nibbling a corner. Clare made a grab—she didn’t want Edmund to get his hands on the rabbit—but the animal fled under the table. Olivia picked her up. The girl’s long face had been morosely introverted throughout the meal, rather like George’s in his office; now it softened as she carried the rabbit out, stroking her ears. “Naughty Flopsy,” she said softly. “Naughty girl.”

  “I expect to make a lot of money,” Edmund said. “I want the book to make you some too. You’re contributing; you get paid as contributors. Now, George, no arguments. You’d pay a man if he helped you run your cinema.”

  George was gazing into himself. “Say it, George. Whatever it is,” Edmund said.

  “I was thinking of my mother. She worked in a music hall when she was eight. She helped my father start the cinemas. She brought me up and looked after him, and kept the cinemas going. And—I never told you this, Alice—she sold her house to subsidize the Newsham.”

  “I know she did,” Alice said, smiling for him alone.

  “You’d think she’d earned a peaceful death, wouldn’t you? Instead of—”

  “I know,” Alice interrupted. Clare sensed her heading him off before he upset himself. “Why don’t you show them the music hall scrapbook?” Alice said.

  “There’s a bit of business I want to discuss,” Edmund told George.

  “Mark, see if Olivia wants to play in the park. Will you wash?” Alice said to Clare. “My nails break easily.”

  She switched on the fluorescent tube; it stuttered like lightning. Something rattled loudly in the front room. “Come and help me sort out the children,” Alice said.

  The children had drawn the partition which stood in for the dividing wall; it rattled as Alice pushed it back. “Is the funny little car yours?” Olivia asked when she saw Clare.

  “Now, Olivia. They’re good little cars, those,” Alice said. “Don’t get settled in here, children. We’ll need all the room.”

  “Oh, why?” Olivia said.

  “Because Daddy and his friends want to talk about Grandma Pugh.”

  “What about her?”

  “Just about her, Mark. It wouldn’t interest you.” But Olivia was sobbing. “Oh never mind, lovey,” Alice said, putting an arm about the girl’s trembling shoulders. “I know, I know.”

  The television shouted; interference or a flaw plucked at the image, pinching it inward. “No, Mark. Not when we’re going to talk. Tidy up your books, now. It’s too nice to stay in. Why don’t you go for a ride in the park?”

  Mark gathered up books about astronomy. “I can’t ride my bike,” Olivia said, picking up books on costume, sniffling. “It hurts,” and she ran upstairs.

  “Take Olivia to feed the ducks, Mark.”

  “I want to play football.”

  “Go on, Mark. Your sister isn’t well; she needs cheering up. Until she gets used to it,” she said to Clare.

  “Used to what?”

  “Something that only happens to girls, Mark. I’ll tell you about it later if you promise to be nice to her. And don’t ask her!” she shouted after him.
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  Clare gazed at the rabbit, which had dozed through the whole thing, squashed small on an armchair, nose buried in the fur of her chest. “Let’s do the washing up,” Alice said. In the dining room she said, “You boys had better take your seats in the other room before the children and animals steal them.”

  Which meant she would be excluded from their talk, Clare thought, frustrated. It annoyed her, this assumption that men must talk while women did the washing up.

  “That’s got rid of them,” Alice said. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you alone. Is Edmund a friend of yours?”

  “Not particularly. I’m helping him.”

  “What’s your opinion of him?”

  Clare gazed into the yard, which was almost full of a coal shed and four bicycles. “I don’t know,” she said guardedly. “What’s yours?”

  “I don’t like him.”

  The tap coughed up ropes of water. Clare dropped cups into the suds; the washing-up bowl plopped like a pond. “Why not?”

  George appeared, seeking glasses. He took three as Alice wiped them. “What about the kitchen staff?” she said.

  “Oh, we’re not drinking yet. Just getting ready.” He began to tidy the draining board, until Alice shooed him away, flapping her towel.

  “‘Away, you scullion!’” he shouted, dodging. “‘You rampallian! You fustilarian!’” and slammed the door just ahead of a ball of towel.

  “Why don’t I like Edmund. Because he uses people. I didn’t like him when George told me about him. He made you do all the talking to George, didn’t he? I think he uses people so he won’t get involved himself.”

  “Did you make him dinner so you could examine him?”

  “No, it’s just that George is more relaxed at home, especially after dinner. I thought I’d make sure he was a match for Edmund.” She rubbed a plate, preoccupied. “And I wanted to be nearby when they talked. I don’t want George upset again. He loved his mother very much, you see. So did I.” She turned away. Suddenly she smiled widely at Clare. “I’m glad I’ve met you, though. And your friend is nice.”

  “Yes, he is rather.” Clare was surprised how proud she felt to say so—prouder than she’d ever felt while defending Rob to her parents. Rob made her think again of Dorothy. Poor Dorothy. Here with the Pughs, Clare could see how unsuited Rob and Dorothy had been. She must go and see Dorothy. God, how bitchy she’d been to her last time! Maybe she could find Dorothy a man. Her mind listed couples: Rob and Dorothy, George and Alice— It stopped, because she’d stopped it. “Yes, I’m fond of Chris,” she said, to get him out of her mind.