The Girl in the Red Dress

by Elaine Chong

  “I don’t want to stay here,” she shoots back at me.

  We could bat this ball backwards and forwards for the next five minutes, so I decide to get straight to the point. “If you’re worried about being able to keep living at Hillcrest, then don’t be. I took Julia over to Tyne Lodge yesterday and she agrees with me that leaving the place empty is ridiculous.” My mother’s expression sharpens even further, but I ignore it. “I understand why you don’t want to live there and that’s fine, but it needs to have someone living in it or it’s going to deteriorate and the value of it depreciate. You could let it out through an agent, and when I say ‘you’ I simply mean that this is what can be done. I’ll arrange it for you. You personally won’t have to do anything except put your signature on a piece of paper.”

  She glares back at me, but there’s something else in her expression, which I can’t quite put my finger on. She says, “So you’ve got it all worked out between the two of you then.”

  “We’re just trying to do what’s best for you.”

  She raises a sceptical eyebrow. “And, of course, you’d know that, you and your sister, who hasn’t actually lived in this country for the last thirty years.”

  I don’t want to argue this out until it’s time for me to leave, but I’m not leaving until I find out what’s behind the reluctance to deal with Aggie’s bungalow. I pull the chair forward so that I can take her hands in mine. “Please tell me what’s wrong, Mum.” She shakes her head in response. “I need to know,” I say. “Renting out the bungalow would generate some extra income and that would make it much easier for you to stay living at Hillcrest. It would pay for carers when you need them.”

  “I don’t need a carer!”

  “Okay, maybe not a carer, but you clearly need some help with the garden now.”

  “The garden?”

  “Yes, the garden. Julia and I went back to the house, after we’d been to Tyne Lodge. Please be honest with me,” I plead with her. “Have you had kids messing about? You know … getting into the garden through that loose fence panel?” She looks blankly back at me. “I’ve nailed it back in place because it was still just hanging from a nail when we found it. I thought I could see footprints in the soil. I can’t think they belong to you because the garden doesn’t look like it’s had anything done to it for months.” She begins to blink rapidly, and her breathing quickens. “What’s going on, Mum?”

  All the while she holds my hands with steady pressure, but I can see in her face that she’s struggling to conceal her feelings. Something has happened, I know it has, but why won’t she admit it?

  “I think you might be right,” she says at last. “That’s why I haven’t felt like going out there very much.”

  “You mean you think you’ve had someone trespassing on the property?”

  She nods. “I think so … just a glimpse of someone every now and then. I know it sounds ridiculous because why would anyone want to get into the garden?” She gives an odd, nervous laugh. “I’m probably just seeing things. I’m getting old and going a bit gaga in my old age.”

  Well, we all hope and pray that isn’t true, but I try to reassure her. “Don’t worry, it happens to all of us sometimes. When Julia and I were in the garden yesterday, I looked up at her bedroom window and thought I saw a woman in a red dress standing there. How mad is that?”

  This time she drags her hands from mine and clasps them in her lap.

  I find myself uttering the same nervous laugh. “Julia said it must have been Aggie. We found a photograph of her in Julia’s room.”

  A strange mixture of emotions passes over my mother’s face. I want to question her further, but she reaches for the buzzer to call for the nurse and tells her that she needs some pain relief, which ends the conversation. We spend the rest of the visit talking about Silvio and the restaurant and how much he and I need a holiday. “Obviously it’s going to wait until you’re safely back on your feet again,” I say.

  Before I leave, I talk to her again about the bungalow and this time she agrees, albeit reluctantly, that letting the property would give her some useful extra income. “But maybe not the garage,” she says.

  “It looks like there’s something pretty big stored in there.”

  “Oh, that’s just something that Aggie left. It’s not valuable in any way, and I’ll get rid of it eventually.” She smiles and blows me a kiss goodbye.

  Lenora

  I watch Richard walk away and wonder how long I can keep up the pretence. When he said he’d seen a woman in a red dress at Julia’s bedroom window, I thought my heart would burst out of my chest. ‘How mad is that?’ he said, and it is a kind of madness, for how can it be true?

  I try not to think about Aggie, but she steals into my thoughts and into my dreams.

  She would have hated being in hospital like this where there’s no privacy at all. At some point during your stay, your every bodily function will be either overheard or overseen by somebody else. The curtain around the bed acts like a Japanese paper screen: it’s a psychological barrier rather than a physical one.

  The lady in the bed opposite me died in the night. Her name was Fleur. She had dementia and used to spend much of the time calling out for someone called Libby. We all thought it was a daughter or a sister, but it turned out to be a dog.

  Her husband and son came in very early this morning to collect her belongings and argued about whether or not Libby should be allowed to stay on in the flat or whether they should just put her out of her misery. I’d only just woken up when they arrived and didn’t know that Libby had been Fleur’s constant, canine companion so I was horrified to hear them talking about euthanizing a member of the family. I kept thinking, ‘This is outrageous! Don’t they realise people can hear them.’ Obviously, I was still a bit groggy, it being so early, and Fleur’s son was very tearful, but I didn’t understand that they were discussing her dog until the husband complained about the constant barking.

  Aggie sometimes talked about euthanasia – or the E-word as we later referred to it after she got her diagnosis. If she hadn’t been such an obstinately private person, she would probably still be here today, and the E-word wouldn’t be a part of my vocabulary.

  She’d always been very slim, not a single unnecessary ounce of fat on her whole frame, but one day when we were leaving the swimming pool, I noticed that she’d put on weight around her tummy. Of course, I felt compelled to mention it.

  I stabbed my finger into her rounded belly. “Finally!”

  She winced. “That hurt.”

  “Hurt your pride maybe. You’re getting fat, Aggie. At long last.”

  “I’m not fat, I’m bloated. There’s a difference.”

  I looked again and saw that her abdomen was noticeably distended. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “I’m having tests to find out,” she said and immediately moved off to go into the changing rooms.

  I grabbed hold of her arm and forced her to stop walking. “What sort of tests? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Just blood tests.”

  “What are they testing for?”

  “You wouldn’t know what it was even if I told you,” she said sharply and pulled away from me.

  I had to practically run to catch up with her as she deliberately strode away to the area where you’re supposed to take a shower before you enter the pool but actually only shower when you’ve come out of the pool and don’t want to smell of chlorine for the rest of the day. I was a bit scared of even walking fast around the edge of the pool because the tiled floor got slippery when it was wet – bizarrely, in my opinion, in view of the fact that it was a swimming pool – so I didn’t manage to catch up with her until she was washing her hair. She pretended she couldn’t hear me when I asked her again what the tests were for.

  While I was washing my hair and had my eyes closed for the fraction of time that it takes to get rid of the eye-stinging shampoo, she dived into one of the cubicles. It wasn’t until we w
ere seated in the café that I was able to raise the subject once more without her doing a disappearing act on me.

  “They’re testing my CA 125 levels,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “And that is?”

  “I believe it’s a type of protein found in the blood.”

  “Okay,” I said carefully. “Why is it significant?”

  She slowly stirred sugar into her coffee, kept her eyes fixed on the spoon. “I don’t like talking about these things, Lenora. They’re personal. And it might not be significant.”

  I reached across the table and removed the spoon from her hand. “I’m your friend, Agnes Bagshot. Possibly your only real friend. If you can’t confide in me, then who?”

  “I don’t need to confide in anyone,” she said, sounding irritated.

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll just go home and look it up on the internet so you might as well just say,” I told her.

  I could see by the stubborn set of her jaw that she was still unwilling to disclose anything to me, so I just sat and waited. We sat without speaking for nearly five minutes. I expected her to get up from the table and walk out, but then I remembered I’d driven us here, so I reasoned that I had the advantage.

  I think it cost her to tell me what was wrong. Cost her in pride and dignity, but at last she said, “The doctor suspects that I have ovarian cancer.”

  Well, it was a shock. Had it been anyone other than Aggie sitting opposite me, I would have instantly got to my feet and enveloped them in a huge hug, but I knew she would have recoiled from that kind of attention in those circumstances.

  I gently put my hand on her arm and said, “Let’s go home.”

  Over the following weeks and months, Aggie had tests and scans; she was examined and probed in places that no woman should have to endure, and the final diagnosis of ovarian cancer was not only confirmed, it was extended because the cancer had spread to other parts of her body. She was offered surgery and chemotherapy to give her a fighting chance of prolonging her life, but she refused it all.

  We were out shopping for a new coat one day because Aggie had begun to lose so much weight and few of her clothes fitted her, when she told me about the red dress.

  “That’s who I always wanted to be,” she said. “The girl in the red dress.”

  “Is she someone you knew?”

  “Oh no. It’s just that Mother insisted that I dress modestly and didn’t draw attention to myself, but I always thought how nice it must feel to have people look at you in an admiring way. I always had this idea that if I wore a red dress, I’d be a more interesting person: a girl with a dash of adventure in her veins. I wouldn’t be plain old ‘Aggie-bag’.”

  I was surprised and saddened. “But you’ve never been plain, Aggie. You’re a very attractive woman and you’ve certainly had plenty of admiring glances.”

  “Really?”

  “Honestly.”

  “Well, it’s too late now,” she said and sighed.

  ‘It’s never too late,” I shot back at her. “Come on, let’s find you something outrageous!”

  We found the dress in a small, independent store – what they used to call a boutique back in the day. It fitted Aggie perfectly, and I decided it was time – before it was really was too late – to seize the moment and go all out for it. I knew a photographic studio that would style your hair and do your make-up as well, so I booked an appointment for the following day.

  Aggie wasn’t keen on dying her hair so we opted for something that would wash out although there was still a tinge of colour in it when she was put in her coffin.

  On the day she was as excited as a child looking forward to its first ever birthday party, and when she finally stepped into the red dress, I understood exactly what she meant: it was a total transformation.

  We did the whole ‘standing in front of a mirror and closing your eyes’ for the big reveal. Aggie burst into tears and the make-up girl had to do a quick repair to her eyeliner. She looked beautiful, and I think she cried, because she finally saw herself as the person, which she’d always secretly longed to be.

  When I thought about Aggie after she died, I always tried to recapture that moment. I would hold the image of her in my head, when she still looked well and I hadn’t been forced to hear her deathbed confessions – though why she couldn’t have whispered those words into Edward Feering’s ears, I have no idea.

  That she’s chosen to appear to me as the girl in the red dress still confounds me, but every time I’ve seen her, whether it’s been in the garden or somewhere in the house, it was the flash of the scarlet fabric that caught my eye and remains ingrained in my brain.

  Julia

  The sun peeps at me between the curtains where I’m still lying in my lovely hotel bed even though it’s nearly eleven o’clock in the morning. After a succession of grey sky days, it really ought to have the effect of cheering me up, but nothing can cheer me up – not even nice bed linen with an eight-hundred thread count.

  I ordered room service at nine o’clock – green tea and yoghurt with organic honey and fresh blueberries. I was looking forward to breakfast.

  After I returned the hire car yesterday afternoon, I got straight back on the train at Shenfield and spent the rest of the day checking out showrooms in West London, which specialise in antique glassware. None them compared favourably to Glűck Glass – obviously I’m not unbiased in my opinions – but it did keep my mind occupied, which was necessary after the less than successful trip I’d made to the country club to ask about Lena Bartok.

  The only thing the manager had been willing to confirm was that she’d been a member of staff till approximately twelve years ago. He wasn’t at liberty, he insisted, to disclose any further information: he must have repeated the words ‘data protection’ twenty times.

  As a consequence of my frustration and my efforts to relieve that frustration, I forgot to eat dinner and then couldn’t face ordering food to the room when it was time to go to bed.

  Unfortunately, breakfast was brought to the room with an unwanted side order – a message left with the concierge late last night with the request that it be delivered to me in the morning. It was from Colin.

  ‘Flight scheduled to arrive London Heathrow 15.40. Table for dinner booked 19.45.’

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. Twelve words. That’s all it took to ruin my day, no not my day, my life.

  What am I to do? Because I know why he’s here. Somehow, he’s found out about Jian.

  I’ve been lying in bed since then, breakfast untouched, and checking through the emails, which I should have opened. If I’d opened them, I would have discovered that Colin returned to the gallery. Connie had written to me immediately afterwards outlining in unnecessary detail what he’d said, what she’d said, how he tried to ‘force his way onto the premises’ when she told him it was closed for business. I don’t think Colin could force his way out of a paper bag so perhaps it was forceful words rather than a shoulder in the doorjamb.

  If I’d opened my emails, I would have read that Nancy bumped into Colin at The Americanas Club. He asked her if she knew how long I’d been cheating on him.

  ‘Of course, I told him that it must be a mistake. I said that you sometimes entertain regular, valued customers. He said, “You mean people like the Tan family?” I told him I didn’t know their names: I said that kind of information was confidential. He laughed, Julia. Not in a good way.

  I really hope this trip to London has helped to clear your head and put things in perspective.

  You’re in my thoughts and my prayers.

  Love Nancy’

  Put things in perspective? They were never out of perspective. I know exactly how I feel about Colin – or rather no longer feel about Colin. I don’t love him. I don’t even like him much of the time. I wonder, frankly, if I ever did.

  He’s not really my type and looking back I think I married him because he asked me. I was flattered that someone eight years older than
me wanted me to be his wife. I’d had boyfriends before I met him – actually quite a few and certainly far more than my parents ever got to know about – but it was all about having fun, having a laugh and making out.

  Colin was always the perfect gentleman, so we kissed, and we touched – but never below the waistline – and the first time we had sex was on our honeymoon. It was … disappointing. I remember lying there afterwards thinking, ‘Is that it?’

  It got better and there was probably a period of time in our marriage when I wasn’t unhappy or dissatisfied, but it wasn’t long enough to sustain the kind of relationship that endures into and beyond middle age. And though I don’t not care about him at all, for how can you not care about someone you’ve spent most of your life with, the feelings that I do have for him aren’t going to persuade me to leave Singapore to see out my twilight years in a small, English seaside town. It simply isn’t going to happen.

  Have I reflected on the future of my relationship with Jian? Perhaps every now and then my thoughts have strayed in that direction, but they’ve been reined in pretty quickly because I can no longer bear to consider the consequences of being romantically attached to someone who is legally attached to someone else – especially someone else with whom they have a child.

  My dearest friend Nancy was right about one thing: I’m never going to be more than adjunct; Jian’s bit on the side. It pains me dreadfully to think it, but it’s true. The real question, I suppose, is will it be enough? And I don’t know the answer to that – not yet.

  I realise that I’m going to have to make plans. Somehow Colin must be thrown off the scent until I’m ready to deal with the situation in its entirety.

  I’m mulling over the options when I get a call from Richard.

  “Where are you Julia?”

  “I’m in my room at the hotel.”

  “Okay, well you need to get packed. I’ve just had a call from the hospital. Mum’s being discharged. I’ve told them we can’t do anything until tomorrow, but you need to get over to Hillcrest and get her room ready.”