The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘He was shot at when he left that college in the San Fer­nando valley.’

  ‘It was a stone-throwing, not a shooting,’ Harold argued. ‘Someone tossed a brick from a bridge. He just had a bruise on his cheek.’

  ‘The British news said it was a gunshot,’ Dear Heart said, ‘and British news is always accurate.’ Rose clapped her hands, but nobody joined in.

  Later, Harold abandoned his plan of returning to the van and said he’d sleep on the sofa. He could have had a bedroom but insisted he needed to listen out for anyone roaming about outside. Rose didn’t think he was worried about bears; for a moment it crossed her mind that he was thinking of Red Indians, but she had drunk too much to be afraid. The man in the hat said he’d occupy the other couch, in case of trouble, but she saw the look he gave Mirabella.

  She was taken to a room with a photograph on the wall of a woman surrounded by nine children. Rose counted them. Their mother was quite young and obviously as poor as a church mouse. Mirabella, eyes outlined in black pencil, said the woman’s name was Ethel. Indicating the basin and the switch on the bedside lamp, she fled.

  Rose would have liked to have a chat, woman to woman. It was odd that someone so good at applying make-up should be so averse to talking face to face.

  SEVEN

  Before Harold went to bed he asked Mirabella if it was all right for him to stay longer, not another night, but maybe most of the following day. It was good to be with her, he stressed, and to renew ties with Gerhardt, but more importantly the rose bush above Dollie’s grave needed pruning. He said, voice jagged, ‘It’s overgrown . . . only to be expected.’

  She told him he could stay as long as he wanted, that, in the circumstances, she needed him. He knew what she meant. She was mad about Gerhardt Kelmann but it wasn’t a happy union—he was giving her grief.

  When he woke it was no surprise to find that Kelmann wasn’t on the couch by the fireplace, just his hat and his trousers in a heap against the woodpile. After downing a glass of milk, he took a carving knife from the kitchen drawer and stepped out into the forest. He inspected the camper, which was parked in a clearing round the side of the house, and was irritated at the bird droppings splattered on its hood. Kel­mann’s car and Mirabella’s were untouched.

  The bush above Dollie’s grave had spiralled out of control. There were flowers, lemon yellow, thrusting up among the dead and dying blooms; the fierce thorns tore at the skin on his arms.

  An hour or so passed, and then, breathless, he stretched out on the colourless grass. Try as he might, he couldn’t see Dollie’s face. Once, the month before she had left him for Wheeler, she’d said that time would make him forget her, that she would fade like paintwork. ‘Paintwork,’ he’d shouted, ‘can last a lifetime.’ He’d cease to think of her, she insisted, because he was the innocent party; she, the betrayer, would remember him forever. He reckoned it was a spurious argument.

  ‘There you are,’ boomed a voice; Gerhardt Kelmann thudded down beside him. ‘If I’m in the way,’ he said, ‘just tell me to get lost.’

  He didn’t know Kelmann well, but he knew he’d suffered more grievously than himself. A child’s exposure to sudden death was surely more shocking than that experienced by an adult. When Kelmann was eleven years old, he had found his father, a roofing contractor, head stoved in, sprawled on a pathway leading to the Long Island Railway. Nobody had been charged, nobody punished, but then neither had the person responsible for Dollie’s end. Not yet.

  ‘The worst thing,’ he said, sitting up and kicking at the soil around the grave, ‘is to realise that time blocks out most things.’

  ‘It has to,’ Kelmann said, ‘otherwise we’d go mad.’

  The sun was now very strong, piercing fire through the lacework of leaves. Kelmann lit a cigarette. Puffing out smoke, he said, ‘She’s a strange girl.’

  Harold nodded. He knew who he meant.

  ‘She only talks about college days.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘It’s not my concern.’

  They both fell silent. Harold rubbed his thumb back and forward across the swollen mosquito bite on his cheek. No longer an irritant, it was still part of him.

  Kelmann said, ‘She told me you’re both looking for Fred Wheeler.’

  ‘She is,’ he replied, ‘I’m just the driver.’ He knelt and stuck the knife into the earth that held his skeleton of love; the metal handle quivered upright, flashing silver. ‘I need to be alone,’ he told Kelmann, and strode away in the direction of the lake.

  Returning to the house an hour later, he attended to his scratched arms. He used a towel in the bathroom to mop away the blood. When he went through into the living room, Mirabella was alone. She said that Gerhardt and Rose had gone into the village to look at Indian artefacts, that his girlfriend was after scalps, Gerhardt’s among them. Hadn’t he noticed how she’d snuggled up to him?

  ‘She’s not my girl,’ he protested. ‘And Rose isn’t interested in men, just Wheeler. She lives in the past.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ Mirabella moaned, black tears dripping from her pencilled eyes. Unable to keep still, she restlessly stalked the room, fiddling with the ornaments on the mantel shelf, smoothing the cloth on the table, clicking the radio switch on and off.

  ‘For God’s sake sit down,’ he bellowed, and she did, collapsing onto the sofa, face pressed against a velvet cushion, sobs wobbling her shoulders.

  After a moment he crouched beside her, hand patting her head. ‘You’ve always known it wasn’t going to work,’ he soothed. ‘Kelmann isn’t the sort of guy to confine himself to one woman . . . you told me that yourself.’

  ‘Knowing and hoping are two different things,’ she said, voice smothered. ‘You of all people should understand that.’

  ‘In my case,’ he reminded her, ‘hope has long since gone underground.’

  She sat up at that, wiping her face with the back of her hand. ‘I’m just tired,’ she murmured, and allowed him to hug her.

  They were still in that position, her head on his breast and his mouth against her hair, when Rose and Kelmann came back. Rose was holding a mess of goldenrod. ‘These flowers are for you,’ she said, thrusting them towards Mirabella.

  ‘They’re wild,’ Harold said. ‘They’ll be dead in an hour.’ He released his hold and stood up, indicating that Kelmann should take his place. Kelmann grinned, and remained standing.

  ‘We met a man,’ Rose burbled, ‘who was a direct descendant of a Red Indian called Little Bush Fire. He had a prominent nose, a bit like mine. He said he wouldn’t be at all surprised if we didn’t come from the same ancestors.’ Still clutching her bunch of goldenrod, she ran to the fireplace and on tiptoe studied her face in the glass above.

  ‘It’s a special day,’ Kelmann said, addressing Mirabella. ‘Some kind of a remembrance of an incident two hundred years ago.’

  ‘Is that so?’ she responded. ‘I couldn’t care less.’

  ‘A British colonel arrived here and made friends with an Indian chief.’

  ‘How interesting,’ she said, voice heavy with sarcasm. She was looking at him as though he’d crawled out from under a stone.

  ‘After a few trinkets changed hands, the chief said it was all right for the settlers to move in. He even promised to supply timber for shacks.’

  ‘That was nice, wasn’t it?’ Rose said. ‘Really nice.’

  ‘Trouble was,’ continued Kelmann, ‘these so-called settlers were the crazed occupants of English prisons . . . the mad and the bad.’

  Mirabella was crying again, cushion clutched to her mouth.

  ‘It’s important to make allowances,’ Rose said. She turned to face Kelmann, one finger tracing the outline of her nose. ‘They were probably all over the shop due to their upbringing.’

  ‘To hell with that,’ he thundered. ‘They came here, slaughtered the inhabitants, then made a fortune out of mining.’

  R
ose gazed at him, eyes startled. Then she moved to the open door and stood there, shoulders hunched. Harold followed her.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she whispered. ‘Really I am.’

  ‘It’s not you I’m concerned about,’ he hissed, nudging her down the steps and striding into the trees.

  Some distance from the churchyard, he confronted her. He told her she shouldn’t have gone off with Kelmann. Didn’t she realise that Mirabella needed to talk to him?

  ‘But it was Mirabella who told us to go,’ Rose said.

  ‘Didn’t you notice how hurt she was?’

  ‘It’s not him that’s making her cry,’ she shouted. ‘She doesn’t give a fig about him.’

  He stared at her. She was brushing the leaves of those wild flowers against her cheek and for the first time he registered the colour of her eyes.

  She said, ‘I don’t know what’s really wrong with her, but it happened a long time ago. What was she like way back?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said. ‘I’ve other things on my mind.’

  It was then that she asked him why he hadn’t told her about his wife. He insisted that it was a private matter. He was astonished at the way she had turned the conversation away from herself. He said, ‘Your eyes . . . they’re green.’

  She was smiling. ‘You haven’t seen me before now,’ she said, ‘not properly. That’s why you keep snubbing me. Ameri­cans never tell the truth . . . I don’t mean you lie, more that you find it easier to hide things. Where I come from we let everything out.’

  He showed her Dollie’s grave. She didn’t say much, just that the roses looked chastened. Then she said she was worried about getting to that place where Dr. Wheeler was staying. She had to get back to England quite soon or she’d lose her job.

  Kelmann had gone when they returned to the house. Mirabella was holding a towel to her lips. It was the same one Harold had used on his torn arms. She said that Kelmann had punched her before he left. She was quite calm and although her cheeks were flushed, her mouth didn’t appear swollen.

  She kissed Rose goodbye and said she was sorry to see her leave. As they bumped from the narrow path onto the highway, Kelmann’s car approached from the opposite direction.

  ‘Harold, stop . . .’ Rose cried, but he didn’t. He had enough problems of his own.

  EIGHT

  They were two hundred and fifty miles from Wanakena, speeding under darkening skies along a winding road somewhere near Lake Erie, when for the umpteenth time Harold said he needed to pee. Clutching his parts he ran into a scattering of trees. The word he actually used was urinate, which Rose found offensive.

  He left the door open; she lit a cigarette and moved into his seat so that he wouldn’t complain about the smell of tobacco. She was puffing away, legs dangling above the grass verge, when suddenly she was confronted by a man wearing a soutane. He was brandishing a prayer book with a picture of the Virgin Mary on the cover. ‘Praise be,’ he wheezed, ‘my car’s broken down,’ and he jabbed a finger at the road behind. Before she could reply he ran round the side of the van, opened the door and climbed in. ‘Drive,’ he ordered. ‘People are depending on me.’ At that moment Harold emerged from the trees.

  The man’s name was Monsignor Secker. When his car had gone wrong he’d been on his way to conduct a Mass for the Dead, that of a young soldier whose body had been flown home from Saigon and buried in a hurry. The boy’s mother had fortunately been dissuaded from looking inside the coffin; it wouldn’t have been a pleasant sight.

  ‘Couldn’t he have been covered with a flag,’ Rose asked, ‘and flowers laid over his face?’

  Monsignor Secker said, ‘He didn’t have one.’

  Harold murmured, ‘This damned war,’ and would have added more if the priest hadn’t kept telling him to drive faster. Rose was jammed between the two of them, her cigarette still burning. There was no way of stubbing it out and she didn’t dare toss it out of the window in case it caused a fire.

  She was thinking of the boy’s mother and the things that would have to be done, now that her child was deep in the ground. There’d be his photograph, in uniform, to be hung on the wall, the gathering together of letters and school reports, the folding up of clothes in the wardrobe; they wouldn’t be given away, not for a year or so, not until the moths had done their worst. Some days, the family dog would be held close for the mother to whisper in its ear that its childhood friend was never coming back. The images in Rose’s mind were so clear—the dog’s ears erect, quivering—that tears stung her eyes.

  She was squashing along the windy shore, the breaking waves spitting water on her shoes. She’d been moaning that she couldn’t bear the way Father constantly raged at Mother, the dirty names he called her. It tore her heart. Dr. Wheeler said a certain amount of pain or trouble was necessary at all times. A ship without ballast was unstable, not able to sail straight. There was no greater absurdity than the belief that the enormous amount of pain in the world served no purpose. Unless one accepted that suffering was the direct and immediate object of life, existence was futile. In any case, the longer one lived the more clearly one realised that life was a cheat, a disappointment. All the same, above the hissing of the sea, he’d begun to hum that optimistic song about bluebirds flying over the white cliffs of Dover.

  The church was in a place called Salamanca, which was off Harold’s route, a fact he mentioned quite loudly. The Monsi­gnor was too busy shouting out directions to take any notice. When they arrived on the outskirts of a sprawl of industrial buildings, he thumped his knee with relief. Rose could tell by the state of the paint-peeling one-storey wooden houses and the amount of rubbish in the gutters that it wasn’t a town with money. Driving down a side street they passed the lit windows of a shop advertising the selling of oysters, a trestle table piled with potatoes and a store with electrical goods heaped outside. A skinny goat tethered to a post was headbutting a bucket. The priest said this had once been Iroquois Indian territory but now it was home to railroad workers. His own father had worked as a maintenance man on the Rochester to Buffalo railroad.

  ‘Turn left,’ he ordered. A solitary street lamp illuminated the front of a stone church with a statue of Jesus, hands outstretched, on a plinth in the porch. Beyond, beneath black clouds, was the unexpected fuzz of an orchard in bloom.

  Three people were waiting on the church path: a stout woman in a long black skirt, an elderly man in a broadbrimmed hat and a young girl teetering on high heels. When the priest leapt out of the van, the fat woman waved her arms about and tottered towards him.

  Rose said, ‘I’ve never been to an American funeral. Do you think I could join them, just for five minutes? It would be something to tell Polly and Bernard.’ She didn’t expect Harold to agree, but he nodded. He needed to buy provisions. She wasn’t to be too long, seeing the skies were about to open and they ought to be looking for a campsite. He wouldn’t be surprised if the weather turned real bad.

  The Mass had already begun when she entered the porch. She could hear the murmur of the congregation repeatedly begging Christ to have mercy on them. She took some time smoothing her hair and buttoning up her raincoat, and when she pushed open the door the Monsignor was asking the Lord to release the soul of the departed from the bonds of sin. May he escape the sentence of condemnation and enjoy the bliss of eternal light.

  There were no more than twenty people in the pews; she needn’t have worried about her appearance, for apart from the old man in the large hat, no one was appropriately dressed. Most of the men were clad in overalls and two of the women wore fur coats that had seen better days.

  It was a modest interior, with dim Stations of the Cross on either wall, candles guttering on the altar, and a statue of the Virgin Mary beneath the pulpit. The air was stifling and only a thin gleam of light penetrated the stained glass of the windows.

  She moved as close to the front as she dared and knelt on a threadbare silk cushion. The priest began to recite from the Se
quence for the Dead. Judex ergo cum sedebit, quidquid latet apparebit: nil inultum remanebit . . . Juste judex ultionis, donum fac remissionis. Though she’d learnt Latin at school, and been quite good at it, she understood but two lines: Whatever is hidden will be seen, nothing will remain unpunished.

  She supposed the woman seated nearest to the altar, grey wisps of hair straggling her bent neck, must be the bereft mother, though there was no trembling of the shoulders, no sound of subdued weeping. Maybe it was difficult to produce tears when there wasn’t a coffin to prod the emotions.

  It was funny, Rose thought, how immediately she had once embraced the Catholic faith, and how easily she had walked away. She’d become a convert when she was sixteen, after Mother had given the baby up for adoption. She’d run off to Scotland and worked in a pub, and at Easter, Jeffrey Crouch, the landlord, had taken her to a midnight Mass. At some point a row of candles had been snuffed out, one by one. Each time the flame died, she had to strike her breast and shout, Through my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault, until she was drowned in incense-filled darkness. It was exhilarating, addictive. If she’d been in England she wouldn’t have been allowed to change her religion, not under the age of twenty-one, because it was illegal without parental consent. It was different in Scotland. She’d been sent to a convent for instruction and would have enjoyed arguing about what the love of God really amounted to—if the nun in charge hadn’t been incarcerated since she was twelve years old. It wouldn’t have been nice to express doubts to someone so absent from the world.

  It was the Beatles, she reflected, and the hydrogen bomb . . . and people taking drugs—something she’d never done—that had made faith dry up.

  She’d never confided in Dr. Wheeler, either about her conversion or the baby. She hadn’t seen him for four years and by the time they met again, that last time at Charing Cross station, belief had long since dribbled away and he was off to America.