Free The Killing Doll by Ruth Rendell

think. We ought to be friends, Doreen, two girls living in the same house.”
    Instead of putting up the real objections to Myra as usurper and iconoclast, Dolly chose a less obvious impediment. There was little she had to be proud of but she was proud and jealous of her youth. While she had her youth, miracles could still happen, her blind prince might come or some genius find a cure. “You’re older than me,” she said.
    “A little bit,” Myra said, going red.
    “I’m twenty-six. How old are you?”
    The flush deepened. “When I’m asked that I usually say ‘somewhere between thirty and death.’ To be perfectly honest with you, I’m thirty-eight.”
    “I thought so.” Dolly picked up her bags and went off upstairs.
    She poured herself a big glass of wine and sat down to drink it. Four dolls sat on the mantelpiece, two little girls with yellow plaits, Myra, and an Indian boy doll in a silk turban. Dolly sipped her wine, watched by the dolls.
    “Sunbeach” was the name of the color Myra chose for the living room, a compromise between her choice and Dolly’s. She thought Dolly might come down and see how she was getting on but Dolly did not. She worked every day and when she had finished the living room she started on the dining room, bought cheap but smart-looking brown haircord to carpet the floors and a three-piece suite in pine with brown-and-white check cotton upholstery. Pup looked in sometimes to give her a kindly word of encouragement, and occasionally Harold, conscious of the huge sacrifice he was making on the altar of marriage, turned his back on the shabby delightful solitude of the breakfast room and sat reading his book in a chair by her stepladder.
    After that initial nasty feeling that he was indulging in necrophilia, Harold had only twice made love to his wife and neither time had been particularly satisfactory. For a while he was uneasy about denying her what he thought of as a wife’s right. He lay in bed waiting for the touch or the question, and when neither came but instead a cheerful “Good night, Hal,” he felt he had been given another night’s reprieve. But in fact, though he knew nothing of this, Myra had not married him for love, still less for sex. She had had all the sex, and indeed all the passion and fulfillment, she had wanted with the married man. She was a trumpery, shallow, insincere woman was Myra, but she had her happinesses and her miseries like anyone else and for her, all the happiness of love had gone when the married man went. In a husband, in Harold, she wanted a man to go about with and be seen with, someone of the opposite sex to talk to, and a provider of a big house and the security it brought. She was not dissatisfied with her bargain, and all the better if she could honor her part of it with her skills and her savings rather than a pretense of sexual enthusiasm.
    By daylight, Harold was proud of his wife’s appearance. When they went out together, it gratified him to be seen arm-in-arm with her. Harold was one of those men who like to say they don’t understand women, women are a mystery. His mind ranged sometimes over the incomprehensible women of history—Messalina, Catherine de’ Medici, Anne Boleyn, Charlotte Corday— their unaccountable behavior lending weight to his convictions. Women were an enigma and his own wife as great an enigma as any. He derived an almost complacent satisfaction from thinking this way. It absolved him from having to consider why Myra accepted his lack of ardor so equably, why she was wearing herself out painting, and why, instead of having a bit of hush now the dining room was done, she should wish to invite people to eat in it.
    Myra couldn’t catch Dolly in the hall again, so she went upstairs and tapped on the door. Dolly guessed who it was, snatched up the dolls and put them in the remnants box out of sight.
    “We’re having a few friends in for dinner on Thursday week,” Myra said in her best suburban wife manner.