The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘He’s been loathed ever since he tried to link Adlai Stevenson to Alger Hiss.’ Suddenly, in the middle of expand­ ing on this, Fury broke off. Looking into the darkness, he asked, ‘I’m right, aren’t I? She’s older than she sounds.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harold joked, ‘by about fifteen years.’ He hoped Rose wasn’t listening.

  ‘What’s the connection? You and she sure as hell don’t have much in common.’

  ‘I hardly know her,’ he admitted, ‘but we’re both looking for the same person . . . a mutual acquaintance from the past.’

  ‘Someone important?’

  ‘To her, yes.’

  ‘Unfinished business, perhaps,’ said Fury. He was again rubbing his forehead.

  ‘I have aspirins,’ offered Harold. ‘Would they help?’

  Fury protested that he wasn’t in pain, merely conscious of the discolouration of the skin above his left eye. He removed his hand and leaned closer. Harold adopted a sympathetic expression, although truth to tell he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  Fury said, ‘I happened to be in Dallas the day JFK was killed. Business, you know. I had a client whose wife had set fire to their house in order to claim the insurance. She was one of those females who dislike men for their superiority. You know the sort?’

  Harold grunted recognition.

  ‘Leaving the court, I took a cab downtown only to find the street to the airport closed. I joined the crowds on foot, caught a brief glimpse of the motorcade, heard two shots and turned in time to hear a third. If I hadn’t looked to my left, at a small boy who was bent down to quiet his dog, I’d have had a bullet through my head. As it was, it just grazed my temple. Luck, I guess.’

  ‘I guess . . .’ Harold said. He had an image of Oswald, eyes squeezed into slits, finger whitening as it tightened on the trigger.

  ‘I wasn’t called to give evidence. It was held that there was no need, the Oswald guy being caught so fast. Then Jack Ruby wrapped it all up and the whole business was consid­ ered closed. Not that it’s done much good. If you need a sympathy vote you can’t do better than climb on top of an assassinated brother, which is why Bobby will get the black vote . . . on account of Luther King. Sudden death does a lot for politics.’

  Harold said, ‘Though not much for anything else.’

  ‘I lost the case,’ said Fury. ‘The woman was too handsome, if you go for that sort. I don’t. Too masculine . . . a touch of the Joan Crawfords.’

  In his head, Harold saw Dollie’s aquiline nose, the firm set of her jaw.

  ‘Was she in that film,’ he asked, ‘in which a woman ran into the sea to end things . . . not from cowardice, just that she couldn’t see the point any more?’ The words out of his mouth, he was astonished at how like Rose he had sounded.

  She came out of the darkness and without speaking climbed into the camper. She closed the door behind her.

  ‘I’d be careful of that one,’ Fury said. ‘She could get you into trouble.’

  He left at four thirty, just as light was beginning to leak into the sky. Before he drove off he gave Harold his address in both Los Angeles and Santa Ana.

  ‘We see eye to eye,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in town around the second of June. Look me up.’

  Harold brewed himself a cup of coffee and sat for an hour or more, conscious of the squawking of birds in the ceiling of trees. Then he went for a shower. On his return he found Rose up and dressed, though it was probable she’d slept in her clothes. To his surprise she’d cleared away the beer cans from the night before and was frying slices of bacon.

  ‘Good to see you’re hungry,’ he said.

  ‘Where are we going to next?’ she asked. ‘I’m worried there’s not much time left.’ She appeared subdued, quite unlike the giggling girl of yesterday.

  He spread out the map and showed her the route he intended to follow: Salt Lake City, Salina, Panguitch, St. George, Barstow and then LA. ‘Barstow’s in the desert,’ he said.

  ‘Desert?’ she squealed. ‘Aren’t deserts dangerous? What if we run out of petrol?’

  ‘It’s not the Sahara. There’s plenty of ghost towns and gas stations.’

  ‘Ghosts?’ she bleated.

  ‘Just empty houses sinking into the sand.’

  ‘How far away are we now from that place in Malibu?’

  ‘Eight, nine hundred miles . . .’

  ‘Oh heck,’ she moaned, forking out the bacon and stuffing it between slices of bread, ‘we’ll never find him in time. He’ll have moved on. He’s always one step ahead.’

  ‘Remember what Mirabella said,’ he reminded her. ‘If it’s true that he’s got something to do with the Democratic cam­ paign, he’ll be in Los Angeles for sure. And I reckon Fury will be of help. He’s the sort of guy who’s got connections.’

  She said, munching on her sandwich, ‘He was deeper than most, wasn’t he? I liked him.’

  ‘You sure didn’t show it,’ he snapped. He wanted to say more but a memory of his last visit to Salt Lake City took hold. He and Dollie had gone there to celebrate the birth of her sister’s baby. That day, on a snow-capped Capitol Hill, John Kennedy had been sworn in as the youngest president ever. They had stayed in a hotel, and a cat had got into their room and slept on their bed. Later that night he had climbed onto Dollie’s body, but she had shrugged him away; on the second evening she had given in, lain submissive, then, violently, she’d drawn up her knee and jabbed him in the balls. She said the cat was to blame; it had stretched out a paw and scratched her ankle. Seeing the night was cold and they were under the covers, that didn’t seem to touch the truth. The radio was on and above his cry of pain he’d heard Kennedy declaiming, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. He’d got up and hurled the cat into the corridor and she’d accused him of cruelty to animals.

  ‘You should have a nap,’ Rose said, tapping his arm with greasy fingers. ‘You look very tired.’

  He said, ‘I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Try not to dream,’ she cautioned.

  It was disconcerting the way she understood his fears.

  Foolishly, he disregarded Rose’s advice before taking to the road. Twice she had to thump his leg to keep him from nod­ ding off. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep that made him dozy; the unrelenting sunshine skittering off the silvery landscape dazzled his mind.

  Then in late afternoon—they had got beyond Springfield in the state of Utah—there was the smallest of thuds followed by a shadow flash of something black beyond the windscreen. He braked abruptly. If he hadn’t been slumped in his seat, he’d have been flung against the dashboard. Sitting up, he regis­ tered a yellow tractor in a flat field drenched in sunlight, a house, white paint peeling, and a woman in green overalls standing beside a wooden fence. She was holding a brush dripping red paint.

  The body slid across the slope of the hood and flopped out of sight. Rose was bent over her knees, making funny noises. He climbed out of the camper. The dog lay on its back, one paw raised, one eye fearfully alive. It was making the same sort of noise as Rose. Then it died.

  Rose stumbled out onto the road. ‘Is it dead?’ she asked, clutching at his arm. He shrugged her away and, picking up the animal, walked towards the woman in the overalls. Rose followed him.

  The woman’s expression was sullen; she had hair on her lip. When he held out his burden she didn’t look at it, just stuck out her hand and ground her thumb against her fingers, nails stained with globs of red paint. Harold struggled to take out his wallet. Not a word was said. The money handed over, the woman grabbed the dog by its back legs, stared at its dangling corpse, then slung it into the ditch beside the fence.

  Walking back to the camper Rose said, ‘She was an ignorant woman. You’re not to take it to heart.’

  He didn’t reply. He climbed into the driving seat and sat there staring at the shimmering field.

  She said, ‘Some years ago, when my mum died, I had to go
to the mortuary and look at her—’

  ‘I thought it was a bundle of tumbleweed,’ he interrupted.

  ‘Just to say goodbye. Most people have to do that . . . not to identify them, just to send them on . . .’

  ‘I wasn’t given the chance,’ he said. ‘Chip Webster saw to that.’

  ‘My mum was lying in a sort of Easter egg . . . paper frills all round her. I bent down to kiss her . . . her cheek was so cold that my tears bounced off onto the floor.’

  Dismissively he waved his hand and leaned forward to start the engine.

  ‘I’m not lying this time,’ she said. ‘It really did happen. And I noticed her nails were messy, so I went and bought some red nail varnish and coloured them.’

  ‘To be ready for the next world,’ he said. ‘Thoughtful of you.’

  ‘The good thing it did for me,’ she persisted, ‘was to make me believe that there’s something beyond death. Her body was there but her soul wasn’t.’

  ‘Soul,’ he spat, as though it were a swear word.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Which had gone . . . and that’s what made her dead.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he muttered, and then drove at speed past the unfinished fence and the woman with the paint brush.

  Darkness descended as the camper devoured the miles, nothing to be seen but black stretches of road stabbed by head­ lights. Then, out of nowhere, Harold recalled an afternoon in childhood when a man had taken him onto a beach some­ where near San Francisco, hand on his shoulder in a gesture of parental steering. The memory induced an odd lightness, a sensation of floating akin to the uplift of the expensive kite he’d tossed into the sky. Almost at once the paper aeroplane had swooped downwards and crumpled into the sand.

  He braked, got out and bent over his knees. He was drift­ ing towards a splayed body spread across paving stones. He heard the word ‘Wicked’ resound in his mouth and vomited. Rose didn’t interfere. He supposed she thought his upset was due to the mowing down of the dog.

  TWELVE

  Forty-eight hours later—they had fortified themselves with ham and eggs in a town called Bunkerville—they drove into the Mojave desert. Harold had taken onboard two canisters of water, one in case the engine of the camper started overheat­ ing, the other to avoid their perishing from thirst. Rose found their journey disappointing; she had been thinking of that film in which Lawrence of Arabia had faced sandy whirlwinds. There were too many bushes, too many clumps of vegetation; twice she saw a fox burrowing into the earth.

  They passed through one of Harold’s ghost towns, its sun­ blasted main street patrolled by a stetson-headed crowd in pursuit of the past. He said they were all tourists; possibly some of them had been born here. There was one house with an ancient wagon upturned on the dirt road outside, and another with a withered shirt still pegged to a washing line, strung from its collapsed veranda. Harold said it had been hung there for the benefit of sightseers. No one in that des­ perate yesteryear would have been careless enough to abandon an item of clothing.

  Rose asked for a drink—it was very hot and she was sweating—but Harold told her to hang on, that he had a fan thing that swirled air around them. It got a shade cooler, but the expanse of flat landscape increased her need. She said, ‘I could die.’ Harold laughed; he didn’t know that sand disturbed her mind. He was listening to an interview on the radio with a man who had been present a year ago when Robert Kennedy had delivered a speech to the Senate about Vietnam. War, Kennedy had roared, was the vacant moment of amazed fear as a mother and child watched death by fire fall from an improbable machine sent by a country they barely comprehend.

  Rose said, ‘What a complicated sentence.’

  Harold told her to keep quiet.

  Who are we to play the role of avenging angel? the voice on the radio asked.

  After a perspiring two hours, Harold halted at an inn, refus­ ing to drive further. He paid for separate rooms. They ate their supper in a crowded dining area, posher than usual and dec­ orated with blown-up photographs of serious-looking men wearing old-fashioned clothes. Rose sat opposite a portrait of Mr. Roosevelt. Their table was shoulder-close to an elderly couple; the man had a paper napkin tucked under his chin, a splodge of crimson ketchup staining the front. The woman hummed some sort of tune quite loudly—when she wasn’t stuffing food into her mouth.

  ‘Your hair’s wet,’ Harold said. He sounded censorious. Rose admitted she’d had a shower. ‘I hate them, but I’d sweated like a pig.’ He stared at her, his expression hard to interpret.

  ‘What will you do,’ she asked, trying to sound confident, ‘once we’ve found Dr. Wheeler? Will you stay in Los Angeles then drive all that way back on your own?’

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘I know he’ll give you the money I owe you,’ she reassured him.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Wheeler could always be relied on to do the right thing.’

  She was anxious to tell him yet again how grateful she was for his help, how she appreciated the liberal way he had forked out money. ‘I’m not the easiest of people to get along with,’ she admitted. ‘It’s to do with my background. I know you might have thought that we’d have had . . . you know . . . sex . . . most people do in these sort of circumstances, but—’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ he urged. ‘You want an end to it,’ he murmured. ‘So do I.’

  She didn’t know what end he was talking about, and didn’t care. In her head she was walking towards a figure in a trilby hat.

  Fingers dug into her elbow. ‘I couldn’t help noticing,’ the humming woman said, ‘that you have an English accent.

  ‘Forgive the intrusion but my husband and I are making a trip to London next week. There’s things we’d like to know, if you can spare the time.’

  Harold refused to be drawn into the conversation. Twice the woman tried to include him, but he didn’t respond. He and the man with the soiled napkin concentrated on the mess on their plates.

  The woman told Rose that her name was Mrs Weiner; she was a theosophist, a believer in reincarnation. She was also a teller of fortunes, a reader of palms, of cards, indeed of any personal object belonging to someone requiring information as to the past or the future. In the latter case, even a button would suffice. Feathers retrieved from pillows were the most reliable means of getting in touch with the dead, she said, but that was because they had to do with flight. Flight was migratory, spiritual.

  Rose said, ‘How interesting.’ Her hand was in the pocket of her raincoat, thumb smoothing the photograph of Dr. Wheeler.

  ‘Theosophy is not such an isolated practice as you might think,’ Mrs Weiner stressed. ‘It began in America, but now it’s a worldwide movement, strong in your own country. I’m due to attend a conference in London in two weeks’ time in a place called St. John’s Wood. Is that out in the country? Will I need a sun hat, mosquito spray?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Rose said.

  ‘We’re meeting in a house that was once occupied by Madame Blavatsky. You’ve heard of her?’

  Rose shook her head.

  ‘Everything’s been paid for,’ said the woman, ‘plane fares, hotels. Is food still rationed? Will I need to take sweeteners?’

  It was strange, Rose thought, how someone so knowing about time, both gone and yet to come, should be so short on knowledge to do with the here and now. She said, ‘The hotels will look after you, but it would be wise to take a few jumpers and an umbrella.’

  As she spoke, Harold got up and announced he was off to his room. He stretched out a hand as if about to stroke her hair, then abruptly walked away. She watched him thread his way past the tables and walk out into the night.

  Mrs Weiner leaned closer. In half an hour’s time there was to be a gathering of like-minded people in a room adjacent to the motel’s checking-in desk. They were part of a group on their way to a theosophist conference in Arroyo Grande. This evening’s discussion would fix on attempts to unearth events that lay buried, f
orgotten. ‘The persons we once were,’ Mrs Weiner intoned, ‘whom we no longer remember, hold the most secrets.’ Admittance was free. She felt sure Rose would find it stimulating.

  Rose decided to go, mostly because she had nothing better to do. There were no more than nine people assembled in the side room, all female save for the husband who had spilt ketchup down his front, and a fat man wearing a bow tie, who was sitting beside Mrs Weiner.

  Rose took a seat at the back and then moved forward; she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by looking solitary. The proceedings began with a prayer to Him on High fol­ lowed by a rendering of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ sung without accompaniment by an elderly lady in a coal-black wig. Rose wanted to laugh. Then the man in the bow tie pointed at a thin figure wearing a blue dress. ‘You’ve no need to stand,’ he said, ‘I know what’s troubling you. You have an illness.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ squeaked blue dress, struggling upright. ‘Help me.’

  ‘It’s the evil cancer,’ bow tie declared, voice flat, empty of sympathy. ‘You gotta accept it as a disorganisation of cells, not as a punishment from God. There is nothing you can do now, except rejoice that you have time to sort out the conflicts that remain in your life. Hallelujah.’

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ cried blue dress, apparently pleased to hear that the end was just round the corner.

  Rose was convinced the woman wasn’t genuine, that she’d been planted there to show how far-seeing were the minds of those in charge. She didn’t think the second and third victims were real either, although their lost memories were more airy­ fairy, more conducive to sparking the imagination. Number two was asked by Mrs Weiner if she had something in her past to do with a man on crutches.

  ‘He’s not tall, wears a red scarf round his neck . . . no, green not red, and he’s trying to tell you something.’

  Number two said, ‘I don’t remember anyone on crutches.’

  ‘Think, think,’ Mrs Weiner prodded. ‘I see a tall building and a swirl of cloud. No . . . no, it’s smoke . . . and I see a figure standing at an open window.’