The Killing Doll

Read The Killing Doll for Free Online Page A

Book: Read The Killing Doll for Free Online
Authors: Ruth Rendell
giggled. Dolly was very offended and when Miss Finlay said she was looking for a dressmaker, she wanted a velvet skirt made, she merely shrugged and said she was in the phone book. They were outside the Yearmans’ house and Dolly pushed the gate open. Nervous Miss Finlay had another half mile to walk up to Crescent Road all on her own. Dolly said good night absently. This was not the companion she was looking for, the friend that would make her forget her birthmark in the excitement of their meeting.
    Pup must be in the temple. The landing light on the top floor was on. Dolly let herself into the house and without taking her coat off, went straight to the kitchen. There was an open bottle of Soave in the larder and she needed a glass of it. The second shock of the evening was when she opened the door and found the light on and Harold sitting at the table with Myra Brewer, two cans of Double Diamond and two bags of crisps between them.
    Harold gave Dolly a sheepish grin.
    “Tell her our news, Hal,” said Myra.
    He did so. Dolly listened to the halting, embarrassed, rather shamefaced announcement in silence. She was going to say she didn’t believe it but that wasn’t true; she found she had no difficulty at all in believing it. Still without speaking, she went back into the hall and closed the kitchen door.
    Then, having taken a deep breath and clenched her fists, she ran upstairs to tell Pup.

5
    T he top floor,” Myra said, “would make quite a nice flat for Peter and Doreen.”
    Harold was unused to hearing his children called by their given names and he almost had to think who it was she meant. They were walking about the house, thinking what changes would have to be made when they were married. Or Myra was thinking of these things. Harold had supposed he and she would simply go along to some register office, presumably the Wood Green one, and get through the requisite very few words after which he would be a married man again. He was used to being married, found it difficult to sleep without a woman in his bed and hoped to resume the state with the minimum of upheaval. He considered what Myra had said and it seemed to him a tremendous step, comparable to changing one’s trade or emigrating.
    “I don’t know about that,” he said. When he used this phrase he meant not that he was ignorant on the subject but that he had doubts of its wisdom or feasibility.
    “It seems so peculiar, a grown-up son and daughter living at home.”
    “I lived at home till I got married.” And after, he might have added.
    “Well, in those days …” Harold was fifteen years older than her, and she thought of herself as a girl; “He’s a widower, he’s got children practically my age,” she was inclined to say when speaking of her future husband. “They could have a bedroom each and the front room for a lounge. I don’t see why we shouldn’t put in a kitchen, a sink and water heater really, that’s all that’s needed. I don’t mind paying, I’ll use my Unit Trusts.”
    “You’ll have to tell them. I can’t.”
    Harold avoided everything disagreeable. It was to this negative aim that he devoted his energies. Walking half a mile to work, poking about in the shop all day (he knew a great deal about typewriters), going home again—he did not object to any of that. He liked having a big house to spread himself in, though he never spread himself much, mooching between the kitchen, the breakfast room and the once-sacred bedroom. He liked living in the house in which he had been born, the only place he had ever lived in. His leisure he devoted to reading what he called “history books,” biographies of the more colorful characters in history such as Mary Queen of Scots, Nell Gwynn, and the Prince Regent (never Cromwell, Robespierre, or Palmerston) and the memoirs of princelings and princesslings of nineteenth-century European minor royal houses. As a result of this, he was actually an authority, not, as he believed, on

Similar Books

Ancient Enemy

Mark Lukens

Soul Mates Kiss

Sandra Ross

Taming the Moon

Sherrill Quinn

Domino

Chris Barnhart

The Becoming

Jessica Meigs

Untamed

P. C. Cast, Kristin Cast

Into the Dark Lands

Michelle Sagara West

The Demise

Diane Moody