The Girl in the Red Dress

by Elaine Chong

  “This is the tricky bit,” she says, but she manages to get into bed and shuffles her bottom till she’s sitting upright against the pillows though the effort of lifting herself into position leaves her breathing heavily. “Phew! I can’t believe how unfit I’ve become. Goodness knows how I’m going to get up and down the stairs when I get home.”

  “They won’t let you home until they’re satisfied you can do it safely,” I tell her. “In any case Julia’s going to stay with you.”

  My mother looks surprised. “Is she still here?” She gazes up at me with an expression of wide-eyed astonishment as though the idea that Julia might have agreed to help out is so implausible as to be totally unbelievable. Either that or she’s already forgotten that this is the reason Julia flew over in the first place.

  The seed of unease about my mother’s mental state has sprouted and is now growing leaves. I realise I’m going to have to insist they do this test that Silvio told me about. We have to know.

  I sit down on the edge of the bed and take my mother’s hand. “Of course, Julia is still here. As soon as the hospital says you can leave, she’s going to move out of the hotel where she’s staying now and move back home.”

  “Won’t Colin mind?”

  “Why would Colin mind?”

  “I just thought…”

  “She’s not moving back here permanently, Mum.”

  “Oh, I see…”

  I have to ask her about Aggie’s bungalow and I know I have to ask sooner rather than later because if I don’t do it soon then Julia will, but this confusion is disconcerting and I wonder if it’s fair to question her about something that she clearly doesn’t want to share with us.

  I take a deep breath and dive in. “I need to ask you something, Mum,” I say gently. “It’s about Aggie’s bungalow.” She immediately looks away and tries to withdraw her hand from mine, but I hold on. “Your vicar friend, Edward Feering, let it slip I’m afraid.”

  “He isn’t my friend, he’s an idiot. He should know better than to break a confidence,” she snaps, and she tears her hand away from mine.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that Aggie had left you the bungalow?”

  This time when she gazes up at me, her eyes bore angrily into mine. “It’s none of your business. If I’d wanted you to know, I would have told you.”

  “But this is important, Mum. If you need help to stay living by yourself at Hillcrest, then somehow that has to be funded. Dad didn’t leave you much, I know, and I’m just trying to be practical. That bungalow is sitting empty when it could be sold or even rented out to generate some extra income for you. If it came to it, you could even move in yourself.”

  “Move into that bungalow? Never in a million years!" she exclaims angrily.

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  Once again, she turns her head away from me, and I can tell by the jut of her chin that she’s still smarting with indignation, but I’m going to have to press the point home. “You might not have a choice.”

  “I’m never moving into that bungalow!”

  “Then sell it or rent it out.”

  “No!”

  “Please, Mum,” I plead with her.

  Her hands pluck at the bedcovers. “You don’t understand.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  “I can’t because I’d just sound like a foolish old woman.”

  I reach for her hands once again. “You have to tell me.”

  She still won’t look at me, but she says, “Aggie made me promise that I wouldn’t sell it. She never had children of her own and she wanted her inheritance passed on to you and Julia because she knew what your father had done. I know I could live there, but I don’t want to live in her family home – both of her parents died in that bungalow and Aggie would have died there as well if I hadn’t insisted that she move in with me. It’s got death written all over it.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I understand why you don’t want to live there, but somebody else could.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she says and her voice wavers. “But I’m not making any promises.”

  Unwilling to distress her further, I decide to leave it at that. When she’s back in her own home, I think to myself, we can talk about it again. I spend the next half-hour doing what I know she likes best: telling her about the exploits of Silvio’s extended family.

  When it’s time for me to leave, she suddenly gets tearful. “I’m not ready to go home yet, Richard, and they keep pressuring me. I know I can’t stay here forever, but when something like this happens, it undermines your confidence. I’ve lived alone since your father died and I’ve been happy on my own for the most part, but I realise now that anything could happen to me and no one would know.”

  She’s right. Julia and I have to rethink this, but first I have to find out what I’m dealing with, so when I see Nurse Kelly sitting at the reception desk on my way out, I decide to ask her about the test Silvio mentioned.

  “I think you’re talking about an MMSE,” she says, suddenly looking serious. “That’s a Mini Mental State Examination. It’s the most commonly used test for dementia.”

  “Well, can you get it done?”

  “The only thing I can do is make a note of your concerns, Mr Oakley. Obviously, your mother’s clinician will decide if he thinks it’s necessary. Nothing’s been written in her notes so far, but I could have a word with him tomorrow if you’d like me to?”

  I have a feeling Nurse Kelly is backtracking, so I tell her that our mother isn’t going anywhere until we’ve had some kind of reassurance, that she’s both physically and mentally well enough to look after herself.

  “Well, mild symptoms can be quite difficult to diagnose,” she says. “You might be better off speaking to her GP after she’s been discharged and asking for a referral to a dementia specialist. Your mother was admitted as a surgical patient and as soon as she’s ready to leave from a surgical point of view, you’re going to have to arrange for her to go home.”

  “It sounds to me like you’re washing your hands of the problem,” I say.

  “We don’t know if there is a problem, Mr Oakley.”

  “That’s not what you told me before.”

  Her face reddens and she gets to her feet. “I’ll make a note of what you’ve told me and pass it on to the appropriate medical specialist, but that’s as much as I can do.”

  “Just make sure you do,” I say, and I quickly leave before I’m tempted to say any more.

  Lenora

  I watch Richard walk away, and this time I’m overcome with guilt and remorse, but it had to be done – the bending of the truth. I don’t doubt for a single second that he’s thinking to himself, ‘As soon as we get her home, we’ll persuade her to change her mind.’ But they won’t.

  The bungalow became a bone of contention between Aggie and me from the moment that she moved out of it and moved into Hillcrest, and we continued to argue about it right up to the day that she died.

  “I don’t want you to leave it to me,” I told her.

  “But I don’t have anyone else to leave it to, Lenora.”

  “You must have cousins, or aunts and uncles,” I insisted.

  “Why would I want to leave it to them?”

  “Uhhh … because they’re family. Your family.”

  It was late one afternoon, and Julia’s bedroom was very warm, so I’d opened up the doors, which led onto the balcony. A breeze disturbed the curtains and the gentle undulation of the light fabric seemed to have an almost hypnotic effect on Aggie, who was stretched out on the bed for the afternoon rest prescribed by the doctor. As she watched the movement of the curtains, her eyelids began to flutter and within a short time she’d fallen asleep.

  I was sitting comfortably in an armchair on the far side of the room. Edward Feering and his wife had volunteered to haul it upstairs from the sitting room for me so that Aggie and I could talk while she was resting. I was grateful to them because otherwise I
would have been perched on the hard, dressing-table stool.

  It was heart-breaking to see how the flesh had fallen away from her bones; how the dark hollows under her beautiful blue eyes had deepened; how her hair had thinned and coarsened – it was like the finest, steel wire, and when I supported her head over the sink to wash it, I had visions of it cutting into my skin, which was macabre but probably indicative of my underlying suspicions about her.

  When we’re young, we tend to think of death like a thief in the night creeping into the room while we’re sleeping and stealing away our life, but it’s rarely like that. Most usually it’s like it was for Aggie: a drawn out, painful cutting of the threads, which bind us to this earthly existence. I saw Death slowly snip, snip, snip, and knew that Aggie’s life would soon be hanging by a single thread. It was only a matter of time.

  Julia’s room looks out onto the back garden and I was glad for Aggie to be able to spend her final days watching the birds fly to and fro and smell the scent of things growing and ripening in the earth below. Though perhaps the sights and sounds of life moving ever onwards like a wheel in perpetual motion only served to underline that she was also part of that process of growth and decay.

  I watched Aggie’s chest rise and fall, but it no longer moved with metronome precision. Aggie’s breathing was ragged, and every now and then she would appear to stop breathing altogether. It was like a practice run for death and I was the sole spectator.

  Soon I too fell asleep.

  When I woke, I saw that Aggie was now watching me.

  She told me, “I’ve thought about what you said, but I still want Richard and Julia to inherit the bungalow.”

  I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, stretched and yawned; it took me some minutes to realise what she was talking about. “I don’t know why,” I said.

  “I’d have thought it was obvious,” she replied.

  Her eyes met mine and I saw that she wanted me to understand, and I did understand, but the property was a gift that came with the price tag still attached. “I’ve haven’t forgotten what you did,” I said. “I remember that day on the beach when you told me what you’d done, and I still can’t take it in.”

  “Did it really require an explanation?”

  “I think so.”

  “And yet you wouldn’t let me explain. I remember how you ran from me. I can still see you striding up the beach; you were so angry. I thought you were going to leave without me. I was so relieved when I saw you sitting behind the wheel of the car. You said…”

  “I know what I said.”

  “You wouldn’t let me explain.”

  “You did it for me, I know that,” I said softly.

  “Can I explain now?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s now or never, isn’t it?”

  It was probably a cruel thing to say to a dying woman, but she nodded and began to speak.

  “I don’t know how I hadn’t seen him with that woman and their child there before – they were living just a few streets away. I knew what he was like, Lenora. He’d made passes at me when he was drunk, and Daddy said he’d always had a reputation.” Up till that point, she’d gazed solemnly into my eyes, but now she shifted her gaze to the window, revisiting the past in her head. “I was driving home after visiting you – I still had my black Ford Fiesta back then. I saw them in the front garden – the woman and the child. They were waving to a man getting into a car. I didn’t even realise it was George they were waving to until after I’d driven past and glanced in the mirror...” She faltered; her voice shrank to a whisper. “He looked really happy; happier than I’d ever seen him before.”

  I felt the blood drain from my brain; knew that a different kind of unconsciousness beckoned. I leaned forward, put my head between my knees and breathed deeply. I’d told Aggie that day at the beach that I didn’t want to know any more, but it hadn’t stopped me speculating. I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to know, but she took my silence as a sign to continue.

  “After that, I often used to make time to drive or walk past, and I often saw them all together. I couldn’t stop thinking about how badly he’d treated you all those years – like an unpaid skivvy. Somehow he didn’t deserve to be happy.”

  I jerked back up to a sitting position. “He probably didn’t deserve to be happy with somebody else, but he didn’t deserve to die, Aggie!”

  She sighed and turned to face me. “I didn’t plan to kill him, Lenora. I just wanted to scare him.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was driving Daddy’s car because my Fiesta was off the road. I panicked at the last moment and my shoe slipped. When I found the pedal again, I’d put my foot on the accelerator instead of the brake. It happened so quickly. I drove straight home afterwards, put the car back in the garage, and covered it over with an old tarpaulin.”

  Beads of perspiration began to ooze from my skin, but I was shivering. “It’s still there, in the garage, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, sank her head back into the pillows and closed her eyes.

  The following day, I drove over to Tyne Lodge. The neighbour saw me poking around in the garage and called over the fence. He was and still is quite an unpleasant individual, and I didn’t trust him not to do a bit of poking around himself, so I told him about Aggie and explained that I was making sure that everything was secure. I’d brought a heavy padlock with me and I pulled the garage doors tightly shut then fastened it in place.

  The car has remained there to this day, and I’ve been banking on the fact that, by the time I’m dead, it will also be dead; the bodywork rusted away and Aggie’s guilty fingerprints on the steering wheel unreadable.

  Now I’m going to have to review the situation.

  Julia

  Another day of mournful grey skies greets me when I leave the hotel. I work out that it’s only Wednesday. I’ve already spent more time here than I really want to and I still have the prospect of leaving the Marriott with its wonderful room service and moving into Hillcrest to look after my mother. Doesn’t Richard realise that I haven’t ever looked after anyone in my life? In fact, I’m not sure that I really know what ‘looking after’ actually entails.

  The meeting with Henry Silver yesterday afternoon darkened my spirits. I was absolutely certain – in spite of what Richard had already told me – that we’d be able to contest the will without too much trouble, but it seems I was wrong. Will I allow that to deter me? Absolutely not!

  As soon as I got back to the hotel after Richard had dropped me at the station, I put a call through to Colin’s solicitor. Although his expertise is in Singapore corporate law, I knew that he’d trained in London. Due to the time difference, it went straight to voicemail, but he called me back early the next day (Singapore time) and close to midnight here. Fortunately, I was still awake – my body clock is keeping its own, peculiar time and refuses to adjust to GMT.

  “Mrs Crane, how can I help you?” he asked me.

  I outlined the situation. “Is there anything I can do?”

  He was blunt and to the point when he replied. “Time is money, and this could take a long time. You’d have to prove somehow that your father made the will under the influence of this woman. Have you spoken to his doctor? If I were you, I’d do a little bit of detective work before I engaged someone to fight this on your behalf. Find out as much as you can about her: speak to the neighbours, people she worked with. She might have said something to someone; inadvertently let something slip.”

  “That’s not very encouraging,” I told him.

  “I realise that, but you need to be realistic. Unless you can show it’s very likely if not indisputable that she persuaded him to make his will in favour of her daughter, then you haven’t got much of a case. In view of your father’s age, in all probability there was already a will in place so that would be a good place to start, in my opinion.”

  I thanked him politely for his advice, but inwardly I was seething, so this morning I called Henry Silver and asked what
appeared to be the crucial question: Was there already a will in place? The answer was an unequivocal ‘yes’.

  This is why I’m travelling back to Shenfield and hiring a car for the day. Colin’s solicitor recommended a private detective agency of all things and I suppose it might be useful, but at this point it seems prudent to do some of the so-called ‘legwork’ myself. I am my father’s daughter after all, which is why I’m going to drive over to the address that Henry Silver gave me and find out as much as I can.

  The house turns out to be a modest chalet bungalow, but I’m not sure what I was expecting. My father didn’t own the property – at least as far as I know, but there are many nuggets of information, which have been deliberately concealed from me, so this could be one more.

  When I was first told what had happened to my father, I couldn’t comprehend how something like that could take place without someone witnessing it, but now I understand. The house is situated in a narrow lane and every property enjoys a degree of privacy from its neighbour that would cost its owner millions of dollars if this were Singapore. On the other side of the road, a line of closely growing trees marks the boundary of an open field. Anything could happen in this place on a dark night, and no one might see or hear it. Richard told me it was a hit-and-run accident, but it could just as easily have been planned, though I suppose the police would have investigated that possibility. Could my father have had enemies desperate enough to want to kill him? It seems unlikely, but I suppose it’s not impossible.

  As I approach the house, I realise that I haven’t got a plan, but I’m good at thinking on my feet, so I walk up to the front door and ring the bell. I don’t have to wait long till someone comes to the door. It’s a girl, and she has a toddler with her. He clings to her skirt with one hand and holds a bottle of something, which could be milk, in his other hand. His blonde hair has been cut in what I’m guessing is the latest style – shaved short at the sides with longer floppy hair on the crown. It looks sticky, unwashed, in fact the whole child looks like it could do with a good scrub.