The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Everything about Rose puzzled him: her manners, her background, most of all her link with Wheeler. Seeing that blurred photograph on her dusty bedside table had shaken him. Her story about meeting him in some remote coastal village in the north of England sixteen years ago simply didn’t make sense. What was he doing holed up in the back of beyond? Rose had no idea what sort of work he’d been doing; she’d never asked, she said, because she’d been taught it was rude to enquire what people did for a living.

  He’d consulted Jesse Shaefer who’d reluctantly hinted in a roundabout way that Wheeler’s stay in England might have had something to do with the Jupiter missiles stationed in Turkey; he refused to elaborate further. Shaefer’s explanation was possibly near to the truth. Rose said Wheeler had frequently been absent—on holiday she thought—because he was sunburnt when everyone else was pale.

  His own first encounter with Wheeler had taken place seven years before, through Shaefer. It was at a reception to mark the appointment of the President’s brother as Attorney General. Wheeler wore a grey suit and classy brown shoes. When he crossed a room he glided rather than walked, head slightly inclined. Sometimes, when speaking, he shielded his eyes with his hand, the way people did when gazing into the distance. It wasn’t altogether contrived, simply that he was one of those fortunate people who made an impression. He was aware of it, for sure, but then who could blame him? Recogni­tion was something everyone craved, if only to prove they existed. During the following twelve months they had dined together on half a dozen occasions, Wheeler always picking up the cheque; at the climax of the year, complimentary tickets had arrived for the game between the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants. Wheeler hadn’t turned up, but afterwards a bunch of red roses with a card expressing apologies had been delivered to Dollie.

  It had been flattering to be sought after by such an important man, one at the centre of things, at least until the real motives for his interest had been exposed. Which was why it was hard to understand his involvement with Rose. When he’d first met her it couldn’t have been sexual. She was only a child and he wasn’t a fool. Nor, judging from the way Rose described their last meeting in London, the visit to Madame Tussaud’s to drool over the Battle of Waterloo, that last cup of coffee in the station refreshment bar, had it ever developed into anything more intimate. And yet it was apparent they had been close, because some of the sentiments she expressed were too heavy with perverse meaning to have stemmed from a mind as uninformed as her own. The night before, chin greasy from her steak, fork stabbing in the direction of his breast, she had declared that soon they would all grow old, that in empty rooms they would dream of those who had slammed a door too long ago to be of importance.

  Rose returned an hour later; she didn’t seem too upset at not finding Wheeler. Mrs Stanford, she reported, had rugs on the wall and a picture of Walt Whitman in the lavatory. She’d been given a cup of tea without milk.

  ‘No sign of Wheeler?’ he asked.

  ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘He left some time ago. A man came round a few weeks back looking for him, but he wouldn’t give his name.’

  He said, ‘I guess Wheeler knew lots of people.’

  She took an envelope out of her pocket. It had her name typed on the front. She said, ‘They were jolly informative about who might be the next president. There’s Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, Jimmy Wallace—’

  ‘George,’ he corrected.

  ‘Whoever,’ she said, crumpling the letter in her fist. He looked sideways at her and saw a tear splash from her cheek.

  THREE

  The Shaefers lived on the seventh floor of a converted warehouse off Connecticut Avenue. Harold maintained it was a very exclusive neighbourhood, which was why there was nobody on foot in the streets. If you went anywhere you got into an automobile.

  Mrs Shaefer opened the door to them. She was short and stout and wore a stained apron over a long black dress. Before she said hallo she swore at a man with a ponytail who was standing behind her. She called him a shithead. Rose felt at home. The man with the hair tied back gave Harold a bear hug.

  Mrs Shaefer took Rose into a bedroom and told her to throw her raincoat onto the bed. Rose protested it was wet. Mrs Shaefer said she couldn’t care less. ‘What time did you get here?’ she asked. ‘Have you seen anything of the city?’

  Rose said that Harold had made her get out of the van to stand at the railings outside the grounds of the White House. He’d explained it was in the Colonial style. She’d liked the magnolia trees. Then he’d taken her to see the Executive buildings.

  ‘He told me,’ she said, ‘that Mr. Truman thought them inefficient and wanted them pulled down but Mr. Kennedy wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘Trust Harold,’ said Mrs Shaefer. ‘Always the man for exciting information.’

  Drinks were served in a room as large as a hotel lounge. It had three leather settees and green glass doors opening onto a balcony. Rose was given a tall glass of something that looked like lemonade. It tasted fizzy and was colourless save for a piece of lemon that kept getting in the way. There were four other guests, a woman, a boy and two men, Bud and Bob. The woman was called Thora and wore white Bermuda shorts. Mrs Shaefer was addressed as George, her husband as Jesse. The boy didn’t speak to anyone and left before the meal was served. Washington Harold had gone to the same school as all three men and on to university with Shaefer, who was a professor of constitutional law and was apparently often summoned to the President’s office. No one explained why. There was a lot of talk about basketball and a coach named Curtis Parker.

  Mr. Shaefer seemed very angry with Lyndon Johnson. He said the man was insane, had turned the American Dream into the American Nightmare. Four days before announcing he wouldn’t accept nomination for a further term, he’d been thinking of invading Laos and sending another 200,000 soldiers to Vietnam.

  ‘Mad as hell,’ agreed Harold.

  The woman in shorts confessed she’d once had terrible sexual problems with men. ‘But then Daddy got me an analyst,’ she confided, ‘and now I’m all right.’ Everybody spoke very loudly so as to be heard above the screech of cars in the street below.

  Rose couldn’t take anything in. The journey that morning had been a confusion of flyovers, underpasses, intersections, junctions, toll gates. Yield, the signs instructed in bright yellow. Sometimes there were fields full of cows, once a river, brown and swollen, once a town with a railway track running down the middle of its street. On either side, bursting back from the highway, the trees tossed rainwater. Nothing had stayed fixed in her head. She was an empty box, only dust under the lid. Not finding Dr. Wheeler had upset her, though it had not come as a surprise. Deep down she’d known he wouldn’t be there.

  ‘Is it wise to go to Wanakena?’ asked Mrs Shaefer; she was talking to Harold. It was the name of the place Dr. Wheeler had given as a forwarding address.

  ‘I guess not,’ he replied. ‘But what else can I do?’

  ‘A phone call,’ she suggested, but he shook his head. Rose thought he sounded different among friends, less censorious.

  They sat down to dinner in a room circled with bookshelves; an owl in a glass case stood on a stool beside a radiator. There was a cup next to it with a fountain pen sticking out. Rose told Mrs Shaefer that high temperatures weren’t good for stuffed animals. She knew that because Father had told her about his sister Margaret falling into a depression after her pet, preserved in a pouncing position outside the door of the hot-water cupboard, had fallen apart from an infestation of moth.

  ‘It was a tabby cat,’ she said, ‘called Nigger.’

  Harold frowned. Mrs Shaefer smiled; her face, with its dark eyes, white skin and plump lips, appeared luminous.

  Rose devoured everything on her plate, even the mess of salad leaves. Earlier, when Harold had decided to eat, she hadn’t dared go with him for fear of diminishing her supply of money. She needed what little she had in case of an emergency,
like running out of cigarettes. She’d smoked two while he was inside the café. He hadn’t said he disliked smoking but she could tell he did by the peevish way he’d fluttered his fingers in the air when he got back into the van.

  ‘You want more food?’ asked Mrs Shaefer.

  ‘Yes please, Jesse,’ said Rose.

  ‘George,’ corrected Mrs Shaefer.

  Rose said, ‘Thank you so much. You’re very kind.’

  ‘My, you’re polite,’ said Thora.

  There wasn’t a pudding, just more drink and the lighting of cigarettes. Rose felt confident enough to scoop out her hunk of lemon. Mr. Shaefer embarked on a discussion with Bud or Bob to do with the race problem. It grew very heated and at one point Mrs Shaefer got so irate she cuffed her husband over the head. He was going on about how misguided the new reforms would prove to be. It was right in one way, he argued, to give blacks equality, but in the end it wouldn’t work. The educated blacks would climb up, become as successful as whites, but the majority, the under-privileged, reliant on welfare and deprived of the incentive to survive, would forget the few honest ways they’d learned to earn a living and turn to crime. ‘You think we have a problem now,’ he shouted, ‘just wait another thirty years. Remember Dollie’s assessment of the future.’ That’s when Mrs Shaefer gave him a clout.

  For a moment no one spoke. Rose sensed the sudden hush had nothing to do with black people. Then Washington Harold wiped his mouth with his hand and said, looking from her to Jesse Shaefer, ‘She’s interested in Martin Luther King Jr. I told her you were there.’

  ‘I am,’ Rose asserted. ‘I really am. I went to a friend’s house to watch him on the television.’ She was telling the truth. She had watched the televised footage with Polly and Bernard. For some reason Polly had wept.

  Jesse Shaefer embarked on a description of the events leading up to the assassination. Dr. King had gone to Memphis in support of a march organised by people wanting the advancement of coloured persons. Poorly organised, it had turned into a riot. The police opened fire; result—one man dead, sixty injured. A committed pacifist, Dr. King had quit Memphis.

  Mrs Shaefer yawned loudly and stood up. She said, ‘I’ve heard all this before,’ and left the room. After a moment the others followed, leaving Rose alone at the table with Jesse. He asked, ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’

  She said, ‘Only if you don’t mind telling me. I don’t want to be a burden.’

  ‘It’s an important piece of history,’ he said, ‘a piece that will determine our future. People need to be aware of consequences.’

  He was very sure of himself; she watched his hand reaching back to finger his ponytail.

  ‘He returned to Memphis on April fourth, a Thursday, and checked into the Lorraine Hotel. He’d been criticised for staying only in the best hotels, so he chose one less likely to cause offence. He was in his room, 306, most of the day, talking about his beliefs. I guess he knew what was going to happen.’

  ‘Gosh,’ breathed Rose.

  ‘He said he had conquered the fear of death, and that though he would like to live a long life . . . longevity had its grace . . . he wasn’t concerned about that now, he just wanted to do God’s will. God had allowed him to go up the mountain and he’d looked over and seen the promised land.’

  Rose kept silent. He sounded very religious.

  ‘Round about six o’clock he stepped out onto the balcony. Someone pointed out a man in the crowd below who was going to play the organ in the church he was due to speak in that night. King said, “Oh yeah, he’s my man. Tell him to play ‘Precious Lord’, and to play it real pretty.”’

  Rose stared at him and didn’t see him. Dr. Wheeler had taken his place, was watching her.

  She was eleven years old, crouched down beside the ditch, examining a spent bullet she’d found in the mud. She knew who he was, though he was so ancient he was all but invisible. He lived in the house with a turret beyond the railway crossing. His wife wore a daft panama hat and rode a bicycle; whenever she went to the chip shop in Brows Lane she hooked a basket onto the handlebars, so as not to be seen taking her supper home in a newspaper. He said, ‘If you hold an object that close to your eyes, you shut out the rest of the world.’ She said, ‘Yes, thank you,’ because that’s how you replied to the elderly.

  ‘King was leaning out over the rail of the balcony. As he straightened up the shot was fired.’

  He spoke to her again, a year later, in winter. He wore a duffle coat and a grey trilby hat. She had a stick and was trying to impale a dead frog clamped in the iced-over rain pools below the pine woods.

  ‘He slumped down, sprawled against the rail,’ said Shaefer.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Stabbing frogs,’ she said. ‘They’re not frogs,’ he corrected. ‘They’re Natterjack toads.’

  Harold came into the room. ‘I’m nearly through,’ Shaefer assured him. ‘Everything O.K. out there?’

  ‘Dandy,’ Harold said. ‘Bud’s going on about the time we went to camp and Mason Junior took a shot at that bear. He left out the part when he screamed and jumped into the river.’

  Shaefer sniggered. Harold pocketed a pill bottle beside the salt cellar and went out again. He didn’t look at Rose.

  ‘He had a fountain pen in his top pocket,’ said Shaefer. He pointed at the cup beside the stuffed owl. ‘When he fell, it flipped out and rolled into a corner.’

  The following month she saw him again, though no words passed between them. On impulse, she turned left after the railway crossing and followed the cinder path that led to the coal trucks beside the powerhouse. It was not somewhere she often went. For a while she clambered in and out of the trucks and threw pieces of coal into the tunnel. Then she found an old hammer in the sand and a wooden ammunition box with a splintered lid. She pretended she was in Occupied France, on the run from the Germans and in contact with the Resistance. ‘Tommy Handley . . . Tommy Handley,’ she tapped out, ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ It was a secret code and meant she needed a signal to detonate her bombs. Now it began to rain, first merely a sprinkle, then a downpour. As she was about to run for the tunnel, she tapped, ‘I am alone . . . wait . . . wait . . . danger . . . I am not alone.’

  Shaefer said, ‘He was kind of frozen, except for the blood gushing from a massive tear in his neck.’

  Afterwards, she stood so long in the open and got so wet that she felt God was cleansing her. The thump of her heart mimicked the forlorn boom of the buoy tossing on the horizon of the glistening sea. When she hurled the hammer from her, it swooped into the sandhills like a bird of prey. She entered the tunnel and began to wobble on tiptoe along the metal rail, and stopped; a figure stood dark against the exit. Then it turned, and for a moment a face was illuminated in apricot light and she recognised Dr. Wheeler. Then he was gone.

  Shaefer said, ‘We knew he’d had it.’

  She was a yard away from emerging onto the shore when her foot touched an obstruction piled against the rail. Peering closer, she saw it was Billy Rotten, the recluse who lived in a driftwood shack in the pine woods. Black slime slithered from his ear. He looked at her, eyes fearful, and raised a hand to touch her mouth. Then his body sagged. She tasted moisture on her lips and licked away blood. She said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Billy,’ and scurried on.

  ‘One could tell by his eyes . . .’ Shaefer said.

  Because of the First World War, Mr. Billy wasn’t himself and it wasn’t wise to go too near. He suffered from shell shock, an affliction brought on by lumps of earth from the trenches blowing into his brain. In time, so Mother had told her, this had developed into Perversion, a mystery disease which impelled him to get hold of children and stick something inside them which could cause an explosion.

  ‘. . . they were wide open, but they weren’t seeing anything.’

  She ran out of the tunnel and didn’t look back. Now the sea was swallowing the blood-red sun and the world was darkening. In the dying light the marram grasses flickered i
n silver strips across the shifting dunes. Above the black hulk of the powerhouse appeared the twinkle of a first star. There was no sign of Dr. Wheeler.

  ‘It was a white man who killed him,’ said Shaefer.

  She never told anybody she’d seen Dr. Wheeler that night, not even when the vicar called round to see Mother about the Amateur Dramatics supper night and she’d asked him if the butcher boy was right when he held that Billy Rotten had been the victim of a bayonet stabbing. The vicar said he was not right at all, that he’d been informed by George Rimmer, the coalman, that Mr. Rotten had died from being battered on his head. They’d found a hammer in the sand. Once started, the vicar grew lachrymose; eyes shiny with moisture, he discussed conscience and how whoever was responsible for such a misdemeanour would never find peace, either in this world or the next.

  ‘It wasn’t a killing based on hatred,’ said Shaefer, ‘simply an attempt to draw attention to the problems of our time.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rose.

  Shaefer blew his nose before helping her upright. It’s only people who are comfortably off, Rose thought, who can afford to be upset about coloured people. She could smell flowers as he propelled her into the room with the settees. Beyond the glass doors a crimson sunset leaked across the sky. Bud or Bob was parading the floor, shoulders hunched, arm extended. ‘Bang, bang,’ he shouted, voice raised above the hooting turmoil in the street below.

  Rose, fighting sleep, found herself slumped beside the woman in the Bermuda shorts; she asked her why Harold took pills.

  ‘His stomach,’ said Thora. ‘He suffers from gas.’ She put an arm round Rose and shook her. Leaning closer she whispered, ‘I guess it was a blow . . . not finding Fred.’

  ‘Fred,’ echoed Rose.

  ‘Wheeler,’ Thora said. Even though the day was fading her plump knees reflected light.

  ‘You knew him?’ cried Rose.

  ‘Sssh,’ hissed Thora. She straightened up and smiled vacuously at Harold who had turned to look at them.