‘When is your birthday?’
‘August the tenth; I am a Leo.’
‘That is quite soon. So I think she is going to send it for then.’
Leonora ripped open the thin brown paper on her last parcel. It contained a black satin cushion covered in gold and silver beads.
‘How horrible, horrible, horrible.’ The cushion bumped against the far wall and fell.
Edward wiped the sugar powder off his mouth. ‘What is it that you do really want?’
‘A doll,’ Leonora said. ‘You would think she could easily send me a doll but she never, never, never does. I hate my mother.’
‘No, you should never say that.’
‘Why? I do.’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Because – you just shouldn’t.’
‘You don’t know anything about it. You don’t know anything about mothers because you haven’t got one.’
‘I know,’ Edward said. ‘But I did once have one.’
‘If she sent me what I wanted I would be able to love her.’
He wondered if that could be true, that someone made you love them by giving you what you wanted, or, that you would not love them until they did. It was confusing.
‘I think that she will send you a doll. I think you will get it on your birthday.’
But the birthday came and she did not.
Aunt Kestrel gave her an ivory carved chess set in a wooden casket, a set of hairbrushes and a jar of sweets, which she had handed to Edward the night before, to hand over as from himself. Leonora’s face had been pinched and sallow and when she had taken her things upstairs, with the handkerchief embroidered with her initial from Mrs Mullen, Edward had gone in to their aunt’s sitting room.
‘She doesn’t mean to be ungrateful.’
‘No. It is hard to know what to give but I thought you might teach her chess as you are so fond of it.’ The Bagatelle board had been damaged beyond repair by being left outside in the storm.
‘Yes. It is her mother.’
Aunt Kestrel sighed.
‘She sends her so many parcels with nice things but never what she really wants.’
‘The trouble is, Violet barely knows her own child and always had more interest in herself than anyone else. You will please never repeat that, Edward.’
‘No.’
He explained about the doll.
‘It seems an obvious thing to send. But I am going to London next week. If Violet has not had the sense to send a doll, I must find one.’
11
Another storm was building for the whole day Aunt Kestrel was away. The fen was dun green with the river like an oil slick where it ran deep between its banks. Edward watched the lock keeper pace slowly along, peering into the water, cross the bridge, then walk back. The thunder rumbled round the edges of the sky.
Leonora was sullen and silent, not wanting to learn chess, not wanting to have him anywhere near her. In the end, he found a book about adventures in the diamond mines of South Africa, and read it sitting on the windowsill. Mrs Mullen rang them down for lunch, which was cold beef, cold potatoes and hard boiled eggs, with custard to follow, and they ate it silently in the dining room as the rain began to teem down the windows.
Mrs Mullen did not come near to them for the rest of the day. She rang the supper bell, told them they must be in bed by eight o’clock, and disappeared behind her door.
Eight came and the attics were pitch dark. The storm had fizzled out but the rain was so loud they could not hear themselves speak, but did a jigsaw in silence. Leonora was bored and lost interest. Edward went to bed and read his book. He was not unhappy at Iyot House. He was a boy of equable temperament and no strong passions, who was never seriously unhappy anywhere, but tonight, he wished strongly that he could be at home in his own London bed. How long he and Leonora were staying here no one had said.
He usually slept deeply and dreamed little, but tonight, he fell into a restless, uncomfortable doze, skidding along the surface of strange dreams and hearing sounds that half woke him. He had an odd sense that something was about to happen, as if Iyot House and everyone in it were a bubbling pan about to boil over and hiss out onto a stove. In the middle of the night, he woke yet again, to the sound of crying, but it was not coming from his cousin’s room, it came from somewhere near at hand and the crying was of a baby not a girl like Leonora.
He sat up. Everything was still. There was very little wind but clouds slid in front of a full moon now and again.
Nothing stirred. No one cried.
He lay down again but the strange sensation of foreboding did not leave him, even in sleep.
And then, a different sort of crying woke him, and this time he recognised it.
He went to Leonora. She had her head half underneath her pillow, which lifted and fell occasionally.
‘It’s all right.’
He pretended not to hear her when she told him to go away. It had been a miserable birthday and he was sorry for her.
‘I want you to tell me something.’
She flung her pillow off her face. ‘I said to …’
‘I know but I’m not going to. I want you to tell me.’
Leonora turned her back on him.
‘What kind of doll would you like best? I want you to tell me what it would look like, tell me everything.’
‘Why? You can’t get it for me so why would I tell you?’
‘I can’t get it for you but I can do something else.’
Silence. Then she sat up and pushed her hair out of her eyes. Edward was careful not to stare at her.
‘I’ve got paper and some pencils and paints and I can draw it for you.’
She made a scornful sound in her throat.
‘Isn’t it better than no doll? And Aunt Kestrel is bringing you one.’
‘She wouldn’t find anything like this.’
‘But she will find something nice.’
She described the doll she wanted very well, so that Edward could draw and then paint it with the greatest care. It was an Indian royal bride, with elaborate clothes and jewels and braiding in her hair, which Leonora knew in every tiny detail, every colour and shading and texture.
‘Have you wanted one like it for a very long time?’
‘Since I was about two or three. It is the only thing I ever ever wanted and my mother knows that and she has never got it for me.’
‘Perhaps she tried hard and couldn’t. Perhaps there has never been one like it in any shop.’
‘Of course there hasn’t, she should have had it made for me.’
He went on painting the doll, wondering as he did so why Leonora did not know that it was impolite to demand and want and order presents.
‘I think it’s finished but I shall put it here to dry.’
He was afraid to wait until she had looked at it and went back quietly to bed, and slept at once.
The following morning, he went by himself out to the garden early, before breakfast. Leonora did not follow him for a long time but eventually she came, carrying the picture he had painted.
‘I’m sorry it’s not a doll,’ Edward said.
‘Yes. But there will be a doll. Just exactly like this. I know there will.’
She put the painting down on the grass. She had not thanked him for it and he was not very surprised that she left it there when they had to run in from the heavy rain.
She asked a hundred times when Aunt Kestrel would be back from London. Mrs Mullen said, ‘When she’s ready.’ Edward said cautiously that it might be after they were asleep.
‘I won’t go to sleep until I see the doll.’
She did not. It was after eleven o’clock when she woke Edward to say that she had heard the station taxi.
‘Get up, get up, I’m going downstairs.’
Her eyes were wild with excitement and she had two small spots of colour burning in the pale of her face. She raced down the stairs so fast he was afraid she would tr
ip but her feet seemed not to touch the ground. She burst into Aunt Kestrel’s sitting room but then some sense of how to behave touched her enough to make her stop and say, ‘I am sorry. I should have knocked on the door.’ But her eyes had travelled straight to a large box, wrapped in brown paper, on the round table.
‘You should both be in bed. It is very very late.’
Edward was about to defend his cousin by pointing out that she should be excused because she was so excited about her birthday present, but Leonora had already gone to the table and put her hand on the box.
‘Is this for me, is this it?’
There was a silence. Kestrel was tired, and wanted only to give the child her present and have them all go to bed but she saw Violet in the greedy little face, a carelessness about anyone or anything except herself, let alone even the most ordinary politeness. She knew that she ought to reprimand, to withhold the box until the next morning, to start however belatedly to control this strange, proud, self-centred child to whom she felt she had a vague responsibility.
But this was not the time and besides, she could not face whatever scene might follow.
‘Yes, you may open it but after that you must go to bed or you will make yourself overwrought and ill.’
Leonora gave her a swift, ecstatic smile and then started to open the parcel but the string had difficult knots, so that Aunt Kestrel was obliged to find her small scissors. The child’s eyes did not leave the parcel. Edward held his breath. He prayed for the doll to be like to the one he had painted for her, as like as possible and if not, then every bit as grand.
The doll was in a plain oblong white box, tied with red ribbon. Now Leonora held her breath too, her small fingers trembling as she unpicked the bow. Edward moved closer, wanting to see, wanting to close his eyes.
There was the rustle of layer after layer of tissue paper as she unwrapped each sheet very carefully. And then she came to the doll.
It was a baby doll, large and made of china, with staring blue eyes and a rosebud mouth in a smooth, expressionless face. It wore a white cotton nightdress and beside it was a glass feeding bottle.
Neither Edward nor Kestrel ever forgot the next moments. Leonora looked at the doll, her body rigid, her hands clenched. Then, with what sounded like a growl which rose in pitch from deep in her throat into her mouth and became a dreadful animal howl, she lifted it out of the box, turned and hurled it at the huge marble fireplace. It hit a carved pillar and there was a crack as it fell, one large piece and a few shards broken from the head to leave a jagged hollow, so that in his shock Edward wondered crazily if brains and blood might spill out and spread over the hearth tiles.
There was a silence so absolute and terrible that it seemed anything might have happened next, the house split down the middle or the ground open into a fiery pit, or one of them to drop down dead.
12
Leonora ran. Her footsteps went thundering up the stairs and they could hear them, even louder, even faster, as she reached the top flights. The door of her bedroom slammed shut.
Aunt Kestrel seemed to have difficulty catching her breath and at last Edward said, ‘I’m sure she didn’t mean to be hurtful.’
She looked at him out of eyes whose centres were like brilliant pin-points of light but said nothing. Edward went to the doll in the hearth, picked it up, together with the broken pieces of china head, and trailed out, afraid to speak, even to glance at Aunt Kestrel.
The attic floor was dark and silent. He hesitated at Leonora’s door and listened. She must have heard him come upstairs and stop and did not want to see him. He went into his own room, carrying the doll, switched his bedside lamp on and sat down with it on his bed. The single large piece of china from its damaged head could probably be glued back, but the shards and fragments he thought were far too small. He sat holding it, wondering what he could do.
‘Poor Dolly,’ he said, holding it in his arms, rocking and stroking it.
The doll stared blankly, the crevasse in its china skull jagged, with cracks now running from it down the face like the spider cracks in walls. But he was bleary with tiredness and returned the doll to its box, put the lid back on and pushed it under his bed.
He slept restlessly, as if he had a fever, hearing the crack of the china doll hitting the fireplace and seeing Leonora’s twisted, furious little face as she hurled it, and the wind howling through a crack in the window frame mingled with her scream. It was not yet midnight by his small travelling clock when he woke again. The wind still howled but in between he heard something else, fainter, and not so alarming.
He went out onto the landing. The wind was muffled and now he heard it more clearly he thought it was the sound of Leonora’s crying. Her door was closed. Edward put his ear close to the wood. Silence. He waited. Still silence. He turned the handle slowly and eased open the door a very little. He could hear Leonora’s very soft breathing but nothing else, no sobbing, no snuffling, nothing at all to show that she was crying now or had just been crying.
He could not go back to sleep, because of the wind and remembering the scene earlier, and because, when he lay down, he could hear the faint sound again. It was coming from beneath his bed, where the doll lay in its box. He sat bolt upright and shook his head to and fro hard to clear the sound but it had not gone away when he stopped. The wind was dying down and before long it died altogether and then his room was frighteningly silent except for the crying.
He was not a cowardly boy, though he had a natural cautiousness, but for a long time he lay, not daring to lean over and pull the box out from under the bed. He had no doubt that the sound came from it and he knew that he was awake, no longer in the middle of a nightmare, and that a china doll could not cry.
The crying went on.
When he gathered enough courage to open the box, taking the lid off slowly and moving each layer of tissue paper round the doll with great caution, he looked at the broken face and saw nothing, no fresh cracks or marks and above all, no tears and no changed expression to one of sadness or distress. The doll still stared out sightlessly and when he touched it the china was cold as cold.
He waited. Nothing. He covered the doll and moved it back out of sight. He lay down. The soft crying began again at once.
Edward got out of bed and switched on his lamp, took the box and without opening it again, carried it over to the deep cupboard and climbed onto a wooden stool. He put the box on the top shelf and pushed it as far to the back as he could, into the pitch darkness and dust.
‘Now be quiet,’ he said, ‘please stop crying and be quiet.’
He lay still for a long time, his ears straining to hear the faintest sound from the cupboard. But there was none. The doll was silent.
13
For the next three nights the doll cried until Aunt Kestrel asked Edward why he was white-faced with dark stains beneath his eyes, from lack of sleep. He said nothing to anyone and Leonora had spent little time with him. She had been in disgrace, forbidden to go outside, forbidden to have toys, kept to her room until she gave what Aunt Kestrel called ‘a heartfelt apology’. Edward had crept in a couple of times and found her sitting staring out of the window, or lying on her back on the bed, not reading, not sleeping, just looking up at the ceiling. He had offered to stay, told her he was sorry, that he would ask Aunt Kestrel to let her come outside, suggested this or that he could bring to her. She had either not replied or shaken her head, but once, she had looked at him and said, ‘Mrs Mullen said I was possessed by a demon. I think that may be true.’
He had told her demons did not exist, that she simply had a bad temper and would learn to overcome it, but she said it was not just a bad temper, it was an evil one. Mrs Mullen had brought her boiled fish, peas and a glass of water on a tray and told her she was bringing badness upon the house.
‘I am, I am.’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m very bored. I wish you would apologise and then you could come out and we could do something, walk along the river and
watch the lock open or look for herons.’
But she had yawned and turned away.
The doll cried for a fourth night and this time he climbed up to the shelf and took it down. It lay in its box, stiff and still, looking like a body in a coffin.
And realising that, he knew what he should do.
He was sure he should do it by himself. Leonora was likely to scream or have a fright, behave stupidly or tell Aunt Kestrel. The prospect only frightened him a little.
Leonora was allowed downstairs, though because she had stood in front of Aunt Kestrel with a mutinous face and refused to apologise, she was still forbidden the outside world.
It was hot again, the sun blazing out of an enamel blue sky, the fens baked and the channels running dry but when Edward woke at five the air still had a morning damp and freshness. He dressed in shorts and shirt, and put on his plimsolls which made no noise.
He looked in the box. Dolly lay still in her tissue paper shroud, though he had heard the crying as he went to sleep and when he woke once in the night.
Someone would hear him, the stairs would creak, the door key would make a clink, the door would stick, as it did after rain. He waited, holding his breath, for Mrs Mullen to appear and ask what he was doing, or Aunt Kestrel to take the box and order him back to bed.
But he went stealthily, made no sound. No one heard him, no one came.
The road to the church was dusty under the early morning sun. Smoke curled from the chimney of the lock keeper’s cottage beside the water. The dog barked. A heron rose from the river close beside him, a great pale ghost flapping away low over the fen.
He was afraid of the churchyard, afraid of the gnarled trunks of the yew trees and the soft swish of tall grasses against his legs. At the back, against the wall, the gravestones were half sunken into the earth, their stone lettering too worn away or moss-covered to read. No one left flowers here, no one cleared and tidied. No one remembered these ancient dead. He wondered about what was under the soil and inside the coffins, imagined skulls and bones stretched out.