The Girl in the Red Dress

by Elaine Chong

  “Why would she want to kill you?”

  “I just know she wants me dead,” I tell her.

  I remember the look on Richard’s face yesterday afternoon when I told him why I think Aggie wants to kill me. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t look convinced either. Of course, I didn’t tell him about the other deaths, which Aggie was responsible for – he doesn’t need to know how Mr and Mrs Bagshot were removed from the picture, and I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to confess what happened to George.

  Obviously I’m a party to that particular crime since I didn’t report Aggie to the police after she told me what happened, that day on the beach at Clacton, but the issue of the car hidden in the garage at Tyne Lodge is going to have to be addressed sooner rather than later. I don’t like to think of it as the murder weapon but I’m quite certain that a judge and jury would have little sympathy with viewing it otherwise.

  Julia gives my shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. “Nightmares are horrible. I’ve been having some pretty awful dreams myself lately.” She hesitates briefly. “I’ve got something I need to tell you, Mummy. Will you be okay while I make some tea for us? I promise I won’t leave you alone for long.”

  “I’m fine now,” I say, but I’m not fine. I’ve known Aggie almost all my life and when you’ve been close to someone like that, you have an almost supersensory connection with them. Richard and Julia can tell me a thousand times that this is my imagination, but I know Aggie is here in this house.

  Julia is as good as her word and soon returns to the bedroom carrying two steaming mugs of tea. “I haven’t had English Breakfast tea for...” she cocks her head to one side and considers it for a moment. “...Good grief!” she exclaims. “It must be the last time I stayed here – what’s that? Nearly twenty years ago.”

  “It was January two-thousand – our ruby wedding anniversary. You and Colin wanted to stay in a hotel in London, but everything was booked up because of the millennium celebrations.”

  “You’re right,” she says. Her face clouds suddenly. “How did he do it? How did Daddy stand in that room downstairs and welcome all our family to celebrate forty years of happy marriage when he knew he had that Bartok woman and her child living five minutes from our home?” A small smile parts her lips. “He wasn’t exactly truthful with her either though. Apparently, he told her you wouldn’t agree to give him a divorce.”

  “Is that what she honestly thought?”

  “Well, did you ever ask him for a divorce?”

  “Yes, and he always refused,” I say. “He told me I was free to leave whenever I wanted, but he wasn’t going to lose his house to…” I use my fingers to quote mark his actual words. “…pay for it.”

  “So, you chose to stay with him.”

  I shake my head. “I chose not to leave – it’s an important distinction. The harsh reality is that I had no money of my own and nowhere to go. But I didn’t stay with him. It wasn’t a marriage; we just went through the motions.”

  Julia’s smile, which had been laced with schadenfreude for Lena Bartok and her daughter Miriam, abruptly crumples, and then she does something completely unexpected: she clambers onto the bed next to me. I haven’t spent time like this with my daughter for more years than I can count. When she links her arm through mine, I’m first overwhelmed with love and gratitude then I find that I already know what she wants to tell me. Perhaps I’ve recognised in her face the thing that she’s long concealed: the pain of pretending to be happy.

  “I think I understand why this business with the inheritance is so important to you,” I tell her gently. I feel her stiffen so I quickly continue, “I know I could have contested the will but you see, it wasn’t a huge surprise to me that I was excluded from it, and I was actually grateful I could continue to live here.”

  “But what about us?” she asks. “What about me and Richard? Why were we excluded?”

  “Believe me, I was as shocked as you were when I discovered he’d left you nothing,” I say.

  “Why didn’t you tell us? Then we – me and Richard – we could have contested the will.”

  I attempt to explain. “You have to remember the circumstances of your father’s death were anything but normal, and I was in a terrible place, emotionally. It took me months to recover from the shock of it all. Henry Silver was very good to me, very understanding, but if I told you now, what he told me at the time, I don’t think it would take away the hurt you’re feeling. George had clearly thought everything through very carefully. It was all written down in a letter. Obviously, he didn’t expect to die prematurely, he probably even hoped he’d outlive me, but the purpose of the will was to ensure that I couldn’t benefit in any way from the sale of the house.”

  Julia throws her head back against the pillow and sighs loudly. “It isn’t fair and I’m going to challenge it.” Her voice sinks to a whisper. “I need that money.”

  I don’t want to spoil this moment; I don’t want to question her love and her loyalty, but I know I have to ask my daughter, “Is that why you really came home?”

  She laughs awkwardly. “Would you believe me, if I said ‘no’?”

  I wrap my arm around her shoulder and hold her close. “It’s okay, Julia. I understand, I really do. You have a right to be angry with me. I should have tried to fight this. Whatever you decide to do now, I’ll support you.”

  She begins to cry. “I can’t do what you did, Mummy. I might as well tell you because you’re probably going to find out anyway, but I’ve tried to ... to have my cake and eat it.” She gives a hollow laugh. “That won’t surprise you, I know.”

  “Has Colin found out?”

  She nods and then uses the edge of the sheet to wipe away her tears. “He’s already making plans to leave Singapore. Someone has offered him some consultancy work. He’s coming home ... home to Suffolk.” In the closeness of my embrace, I feel her shudder. “I can’t do it,” she says. “Even if I was happily married to him, I couldn’t live in some East Anglian backwater.”

  “Does this ... piece of cake … does he have a name?”

  “He has a name.” She chokes back more tears. “But he’s doing the Singapore sidestep.”

  I don’t know what that means, but I can make a good guess. I tell her. “Oh my, Julia, you don’t make things easy for yourself, do you? How can I help you?”

  She sits up and blinks away the tears. “I still have the gallery. It’s been more profitable than I’ve ever let on to Colin. I guess I can just about manage on the income from it, but I’m going to need somewhere to live. I’ll never be able to afford to buy but I could rent a one-bedroom apartment if I could get a deposit together. Colin might help me. He’s a good man.” She offers me a wry smile. “He won’t see me turned out on the street.”

  “So, you really need this money,” I say.

  She nods. “I’m not going to give up fighting for what’s rightfully mine, but in the meantime...” She leaves the sentence unfinished, but I think I understand what she’s asking of me. The difficulty is, only I know the true price that will be paid if I sell Tyne Lodge.

  Julia

  My mother insists that she doesn’t need help to shower and dress, and I don’t insist that she does. I do, however, stand outside the door of her en suite – just in case – and when she returns to the bedroom in a towelling bathrobe, I offer to find her something easy to put on. We both agree that it’s too soon for trousers but argue over a dress. It’s a green, shirt style in a crisp linen mix. “Why don’t you wear this?” I hold it up for her to see. “You could wear it with a narrow, leather belt.”

  Her response is a scornful laugh. “If you did your own ironing, you’d know why that isn’t a good idea.”

  “But it’s pretty,” I say.

  “I think something practical would be better. In any case, I find linen itchy at the best of times. When women get to the age that I am, Julia, it’s always comfort over style.”

  I smile and she smiles back because she
thinks I agree with her, but in my head, I’m thinking that’s one compromise I’ll never be making.

  She eventually decides on a navy flared skirt with an elastic waistband – a frankly hideous piece of clothing. She wants to wear it with a navy and white-striped pullover and is only reluctantly persuaded to choose a pink blouse.

  “What’s wrong with the pullover?” she says a little wistfully. “It’s cashmere.”

  “There’s a reason why they call blue and white stripes the nautical look. If you fall off a boat, they can spot you in the water a mile away. Do you really want that kind of visibility?”

  “But I like it,” she insists. “It’s comfy.”

  “It leaches the colour from your face and you’re still as white as a…” I nearly say the word ‘ghost’ but stop myself just in time. “…as a hospital sheet. You need something that reflects a healthy glow. Pink is perfect. Just put it on.”

  “You’re very bossy,” she observes with a mock frown. “I’m not used to being told what to do.”

  “Well, I’m very used to ordering people around so you’re going to have to put up with it while I’m staying here,” I tell her.

  “I think I liked you better when you were curled up next to me crying about Colin.”

  “I wasn’t crying about Colin. I was just feeling sorry for myself. I think we both need to pull ourselves together. You need to forget about Aggie for a start. She was given the celestial red card two years ago and there’s no coming back after that kind of sending off.”

  “How can you be so sure?” she asks. The teasing note in her voice has disappeared.

  “I could ask you the same question?” I say.

  My mother’s expression darkens. “I’ve seen her.”

  “Really?” I fail to keep the note of sarcasm out of my voice, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  She says, “Sometimes I see her clearly even though it’s dark outside. Sometimes it’s just a flash of red out of the corner of my eye. Other times … it’s like a faded photograph. I can only just make out her face.”

  I gently push her onto the bed and sit down next to her. I take her hand and hold it really tightly, and then I kiss her cheek. I haven’t kissed my mother since … since I was just a girl. Her skin is soft and smells of lemon balm. It’s still warm from the shower. I sense a frailty and a vulnerability that I’ve never experienced with her before. It frightens me. I’m frightened for her, because it doesn’t really matter whether Aggie is real [if ghosts can be real] or if Aggie is a product of her decaying brain: all that matters is that my mother is now scared to live in this house on her own.

  “I’m going to make us some breakfast,” I say.

  My mother glances at the clock. “I think you’d better make that brunch.”

  “Even better,” I tell her. “I don’t do much cooking, but I think I could manage bacon and eggs. Would that be okay?”

  She offers me a tremulous smile. “That would be marvellous.”

  With breakfast and lunch successfully negotiated at the same time, I suggest we place an order for some more food online. I’m thinking ready meals or anything that can be heated up in the oven. My mother is intrigued by the idea of the supermarket delivering her shopping and seems to have forgotten her fears about Aggie returning from the dead.

  “This is how it used to be,” she says smiling broadly. “Just like the old days.”

  “The old days? The internet wasn’t invented till about nineteen-ninety.”

  “Oh, I know that, Silly. I mean, getting groceries delivered to your house.”

  “Well, there isn’t much alternative,” I say.

  “You could take a taxi to the supermarket. Then you could have a proper look round.”

  “That just isn’t going to happen.”

  “Don’t you go food shopping in Singapore? Or do you order online like Richard does?”

  “I have a maid, Mummy. She does all the boring things I don’t want to do. That’s what she gets paid for.”

  My mother sniffs her disapproval then makes changes to the list I’ve made. “I’m not eating microwave meals every day, Julia.”

  “But I can’t cook.”

  “I’ll tell you what to do,” she says. “That’ll make a change, won’t it? You being bossed about.” She digs me in the ribs and laughs – a little too heartily, I feel, as the joke is at my expense.

  Our delivery slot is from four till five, so we have a whole afternoon to while away. We watch a film then I insist that she does the exercises, which the physiotherapist showed her. They seem to involve various kinds of leg raises while she holds onto the back of a chair.

  I’m admiring the way she manages to balance and suggesting a few changes to her technique when the doorbell rings. Thinking it’s the early delivery of our food shopping, I rush to answer it. Standing on the doorstep is Colin. For a moment I’m completely bewildered, and I think I must be looking at up him as though he’s a total stranger, because he looks rather cross.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  I recover quickly. “Yes, yes, of course. Come in.” He walks straight past me into the sitting room. “Hallo, Lenora,” I hear him say. “You’re looking very sprightly.” I don’t hear her reply, but I know my mother is more than capable of holding her own, so I leave her to it while I retreat to the kitchen to make coffee.

  When I return to the room, my mother continues to exchange pleasantries with Colin for about ten more minutes before she excuses herself. “Time for my afternoon rest, I think.”

  Ever the well-bred gentleman, Colin quickly gets to his feet and waits while she makes a slow but dignified exit. She deliberately catches my eye as she limps towards the door and her smile is warm and encouraging.

  “So…” I say to him. “What brings you here? I mean … why did you come? I thought … well, I didn’t know…” Even to my own ears, this rambling attempt to open the conversation sounds utterly pathetic.

  “It’s okay, Julia, I’m not checking up on you: things have gone way too far for me to waste any more of my time doing that.” He sits down again, pours himself a cup of coffee.

  I feel my face suddenly become uncomfortably immobile, but my heart has broken into a gallop. I never thought, not for a single moment, that our marriage would end this way: Colin detached and emotionally unresponsive; me flustered, even confused.

  He continues in the same matter-of-fact tone. “I’ve been in Suffolk looking at properties. Found a nice bungalow in Nacton. It’s about a fifteen-minute drive to the port at Felixstowe, so perfectly placed for work.” He finally turns his head and looks at me, grey eyes as cold and uninviting as the bleak North Sea. “I decided to pay my respects to your mother as it wasn’t too far out of my way. I’m surprised how well she looks.”

  This is more than I can bear. I feel tears spring to my eyes. “I’m so sorry, Colin,” I blurt out. “For everything.”

  His response is a compression of his pale pink lips. He says, “You’ve never truly been sorry for anything in your whole life.”

  “I’m sorry for this.”

  “You’re only sorry that you got found out.”

  There seems little point in denying it, but I didn’t want to hurt him: that was never my intention. I blink back my tears. “I’m not going to bore you with excuses for my behaviour; I know it was wrong and I know it’s over between us. But we are still married, Colin, and we need to talk about the future.”

  “I know where my future lies,” he replies. “My working life in Singapore was always going to end like this. We aren’t exiles, Julia. We’re expats and there was always the expectation that we’d come back here. You knew that right from the start.”

  “But we don’t have to!” I cry.

  “I want to,” Colin says. He looks down into his coffee cup and for the first time since he arrived at Hillcrest his voice falters. “I’ve had my suspicions about you for a long while. Always working late; always going out to dinner; always unavai
lable.” He looks up at me and adds, “In every conceivable way.” He utters a mirthless laugh. “It was one of my clients who gave me the idea to check your office at the gallery. He was talking about criminal activity at the port in Singapore. He said, there’s always a paper trail, you just have to know where to look.” He finishes his coffee and gets to his feet. “We can come to some arrangement about the apartment, but you can’t stay there indefinitely.”

  “I realise that,” I say weakly.

  “Do you want to involve a solicitor?” he asks. “If you do, you’ll have to pay for it yourself.”

  “You know I don’t have any money.”

  “I don’t know. We stopped … communicating … a long time ago and anything you did tell me was probably a lie.”

  My instinctive reaction is to protest because the only thing I ever deliberately concealed from him was my relationship with Jian, but it’s a fair comment under the circumstances. I take a deep breath before I respond. I don’t want to antagonise him while I still need his assistance, but I’m not going to be browbeaten into simply giving up my home and my possessions because he wants rid of me.

  “I think…” I say in a calm and controlled voice, “…I think it would be sensible to spend some time apart. I don’t know how long my mother’s going to need me here, but it’ll be long enough for us to give some considered thought as to how we’re going to manage this … this separation.”

  I accompany him to the door, but before he leaves, he says, “What really rankles is that I tried my best to give you a good life and I believe I succeeded in doing that, but it wasn’t enough, was it?” His face contorts with suppressed emotion; his eyes brim with involuntary tears. “I wanted a family. I wanted children and grandchildren, but it was always about you and what you wanted.” He cups my face in his hand, looks deep into my eyes and asks, “Have you really got what you wanted, Julia? I wonder…” And then he leaves, firmly closing the door behind him.

  Richard