Dolly by Susan Hill Page A

interested and alert to my surroundings, and yet also lonely and apprehensive, determined but fearful. And when I had first glimpsed the place, I had shivered, though I had not known why. It was as though nothing was exactly as it seemed to be, like a place in a story, there were other dimensions, shadows, secrets, the walls seemed to be veryslightly crooked. I was not an especially imaginative child, so I was even more aware of what I felt.
    The house smelled of dust and emptiness but not, to my surprise, of damp or mould, and although everything seemed a little more faded and neglected, there was no interior damage. I pulled up some of the blinds and opened a couple of windows. A bird had fallen down one of the chimneys and its body lay in the empty fireplace, grass sprouted on window ledges. But the place was just habitable, if I found someone to clean and reorder it. Leonora would at least have a roof over her head for however long she and the child needed it.
    I had noticed that the box I had sent from Szargesti was in the porch, tucked safely out of the weather. I took it inside and decided that I would place it upstairs in the small room off the main bedroom which Leonora might well choose for her daughter. The attics were too far away and lonely for a small child.
    I put the box on the shelf, hesitating about whether to take the doll out and display it, or leave it as a surprise. In the end I removed all the outer wrapping and string, but left the box closed, so that the little girl could have the fun of opening it.

19
    I have written this account in a reasonably calm, even detached frame of mind. I have remembered that first strange childhood visit to Iyot House in some detail without anxiety and although it distressed me a little to recall the unpleasantness over the doll with the aged face, its burial and exhumation, and Leonora’s violent tempers, I have written with a steady hand. Events were peculiar, strange things happened, and yet I have looked back steadily and without falling prey to superstitions and night terrors. I have always believed that the odd happenings could be put down to coincidence or perhaps the effects of mood and atmosphere. I suppose I believed myself to be a rational man.
    But reason does not help me now that I come to the climax of the story, and as I remember and as I write, I feel as if there is no ground beneath my feet, that I might disintegrate at any moment, that my flesh will dissolve. I feel afraid but I do not know of what. I feel helpless and at the mercy of strange events and forces which not only can I not explain away but in which I do not believe.
    Yet what happened, happened, all of it, and the end lies in the beginning, in our childhood. But the blame is not mine, the blame is all Leonora’s.
    Work preoccupied me and then Catherine and I took a trip to New York, so that I was not in touch with Leonora until she had been living in Iyot House for some weeks.
    It was one day in December when I had finished some more work in Cambridge earlier than I had expected, and I decided to drive across to Iyot House and either beg a bed for the night there or carry on to the inn at Cold Eeyle. I tried to telephone my cousin in advance but there was no reply and so I simply set off. It was early dusk and the sun was flame and ruby red in the clearest of skies as I went towards the fens. Once off the trunk roads, it was as quiet as ever. There were few lock keeper’s cottages occupiednow – that had been the one major change since my boyhood – but here and there a light glowed through windows, and the glint of these or of the low sun touched the black deep slow-running waters in river and dyke. The church at Iyot Lock stood out as a beacon in the flat landscape for miles ahead, the last of the sun touching its gilded flying angels on all four corners of the tower.
    It was beautiful and seemed so serene an aspect that I was moved and felt happier to be coming here than ever before.