The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (9 page)

He said, ‘I didn't notice the earrings.'

‘I closed my eyes,' she told them. ‘I've read about this sort of thing. They won't shoot you if you don't stare at their faces.'

She described a woman with a plaster on her knee who had reached the counter seconds before Harold. There was also a man in the line behind, scribbling doodles on a newspaper, who was carrying a scarf before he raced for the doors and clamped it over his face.

‘His scarf,' she said, ‘was a tartan one . . . from Scotland. I don't know which clan.'

Asked where she would be staying, she said, ‘It's somewhere in Malibu. A rich place by the sea.'

After studying his bank account details and accompanying them to the camper to examine Rose's passport and visa, the police allowed them to continue their journey.

Back on the road, Harold tried to talk to her. He was convinced she must feel fragile, frightened. He was appalled at his previous wish that she should die, tormented by the ludicrous thought that God had heard him.

‘You can break down now,' he said. ‘I'll understand. It's only normal after what you've been through.'

‘I don't feel like breaking,' she said. ‘It wasn't that out of the ordinary.'

He couldn't fathom her and decided that his own reaction had stemmed from an acute awareness of danger; certain people were more sensitive than others. To blot out the doubts crowding his mind, he turned on the radio in the middle of a political debate, about Kennedy's chances of winning the Ore­gon primary.

There is a feeling among ordinary Americans that there's a malfunction in society, one so gross and puzzling that no ordinary politician can bring relief . . . Kennedy alone can exert authority, charismatic authority . . .

But everyone knows charisma is unstable. It can prove intolerant, inflexible. Mistakes could be made . . . and the magic cloak, once ripped, can never be mended . . .

‘I once had a cloak,' Rose gabbled. ‘It was my auntie's. It's not true they can't be mended, not if you take them to a dressmaker.'

Irritated, he asked, ‘Are you sure you didn't feel fear?'

‘No,' she said. ‘I'd read a book about it.'

‘About what? By who?'

She said, ‘I don't remember. Napoleon the first had something to with it, or the second. Dr. Wheeler gave it to me.' Sliding down in her seat, she closed her eyes and blocked him out.

 

 

 

 

 

T
he nearer the van took Rose towards Los Angeles—the dream-like passages over hills dotted with juniper trees, the descents into swathes of sea-green lowlands, the tunnelling through black forests bordering deserted roads—the more elusive Dr. Wheeler became. It was disconcerting. Sometimes, when there was nothing on either side of the track other than jagged rocks sloping down to distant valleys speckled with toy cows, he vanished altogether. Perplexed, she took out a photograph of him, the one she'd snapped at Charing Cross station, hand raised to obscure his face, wrist encased in the crocodile-skin strap of his watch.

‘We'll find him,' Harold said. ‘You mustn't worry.' He sounded kind, really understanding.

That night they stayed somewhere in a region called the Badlands, where, as the sun began to drop, the fiery hills and cliffs stopped blazing, fading pale rose and gold. The flies were particularly fierce and Harold spent the night squirting the inside of the van with a fog of insect repellent. In the end, Rose clambered out to seek sleep under a heaven hazy with starlight.

She was trying to work out what she would tell Polly and Bernard on her return. She would have to keep to herself what she felt about Harold, because he was their friend. He had, in fact, had a long discussion with her the day after the incident with the gunman, to do with his behaviour towards her, his lack of patience. It was due, he'd said, to his foolish expectations of what it might have been like—the two of them seeing such wonders of nature together—and his reaction to the way things had actually been between them. He was sorry, he said, if he'd been difficult, but she ought to understand that he wasn't used to spending time with a woman, not since the loss of his wife. It was clever, Rose thought, the way he shifted blame away from himself.

She'd nodded and said she quite understood, although if the truth be told she hadn't found him difficult, or rather she was so used to his sort of response that it hadn't bothered her. She didn't mind how he treated her, just as long as he got her to Dr. Wheeler. His attitude was no different from that of her parents. He was unsure of who he was, frightened of who he might be. He rambled on a lot about being open with her, but he hadn't mentioned a word about weeing in his pants at the bank.

Harold stopped in a town near Yellowstone Park, anxious to make a telephone call about his investments. Above the drugstore in the dusty main street hung a tattered cutout of Santa Claus, sitting in his wagon without any reindeer. Americans, Rose thought, were very keen on Christmas. The men on the sidewalk were dressed like cowboys and most of the ladies tapped by in white high-heeled shoes. Behind a shop labelled ‘Happy Hunting', a giant blue globe perched on stilts reared up towards the sky. Harold said it was a water tower.

He sent her into the post office to buy stamps while he went to make his call. There was a Wanted poster of James Earl Ray, killer of Martin Luther King Jr, on the main wall. Stuck there, it was much more startling than the image that flicked on and off on television screens. Plucking up courage, Rose asked the man behind the counter if she could have it. It would make a nice present for Polly and Bernard.

‘In my country,' she explained, ‘all of us are very anxious that Mr. Ray should be brought to justice. I'll display it inside the House of Commons.'

It took time for her request to be understood—they thought she was a foreigner—but after she'd told them she was a close relation of the Prime Minister of England, permission was granted and she walked out with the poster rolled up under her arm.

They entered Yellowstone Park in mid-afternoon. Rose knew about it from geography lessons at school. It had lots of hot springs bubbling spouts of mud, and one, Old Faithful, which shot up seventy feet into the air every day, on the dot of half past five. You could set your watch by it. Some of the redwoods were a million years old and a mile high; there was one with a split in its trunk wide enough for a car to drive though. The campsite had lavatories adorned with funny signs, ‘Jack—Jim' for the men, ‘Joan—Jill' for the women, and strings of coloured lights slung between the trees.

They parked in the smallest site, away from the giant trucks and trailers, the Rest-U-Easy and Komfy Kampers, because Harold said they turned their generators on at night and it grew too noisy. When he began his daily shenanigans, sweeping out the van and rinsing the squashed flies off the windscreen, she tried to help by gathering up the newspapers from the driving seat. He told her to leave off; he could manage.

She was sitting on a hillock of grass nearby when a tall man with a red face approached.

‘Hi, fellow travellers,' he shouted, ‘Trust you're not too done in.' Harold said he wasn't.

‘Praise be to God,' the man said. ‘It's the wife's birthday and I aim to give her a good time. Be mighty pleased if you and your daughter would join us.'

‘That's very kind . . .' began Harold, on the way to a refusal. The man took no notice. ‘Sure could do with a helping hand,' he continued. ‘There's stuff to be moved if you folks are up to it.' Reluctantly, Harold nodded; he wasn't brave enough to back out.

He spent less than an hour constructing tables from lengths of wood laid across boxes before returning to his cleaning. Rose stayed longer, gathering wild flowers and stuffing them into jam jars. The scarlet-faced man thanked her. His smile was warm, but his eyes were cold.

Nothing happened until dusk. Harold couldn't wait that long for food and fried himself two eggs on the paraffin stove. He looked careworn. Rose changed into a flowery skirt, and a blouse that had belonged to her mother. Harold drew attention to the moth hole in the collar.

The red-faced man was called Hayland. He was obviously on good terms with God, for he kept calling on Him to look after the meat roasting on the spit above the fire. His wife had big bosoms and went by the name of Saucy Sue. Owing to the attention Hayland gave to her buttocks, the patting, the fondling, Harold said it was out of the question that they were married. For once, Rose knew he was right. She had never, ever, seen Father touch Mother in a saucy way.

No more than two dozen people assembled under the fairy lights, in spite of the numerous tables. Hayland was disappointed, that was obvious. He kept wandering into the trees and shouting, ‘Roll up, roll up. Everybody welcome.' And he drank a lot.

A man in a baseball hat attached himself to Harold. They sat outside the radiance of the fire, perched on upturned buckets, beer cans in hand, deep in conversation. A boy with the beginnings of a moustache questioned Rose about the Beatles. He was very hesitant and kept saying he was sorry if he was bothering her, but had she ever met them? She said she believed two of them had attended the art school round the corner from where she had once lived, but no, she had never actually seen them. His mother pushed in; she too was unable to utter a sentence without apologising for being intrusive. Within minutes, Rose was surrounded by stout women and muscular men expressing themselves so politely that she couldn't respond, not from the heart. The war came into it somewhere, the part her country had played. They made it sound as if she'd had a hand in it, even though she'd spent most of the Blitz asleep under the dining-room table. It was true that the British had conquered the Germans, but they wouldn't have done it if Mr. Roosevelt hadn't lent money to Winston Churchill. Rose began to work out that the people around her weren't educated; they belonged to a different class from Mirabella, the Shaefers, or that man in the dressing gown who had thumped Harold.

She was dwelling on this when someone put an arm round her and steered her from the group. Fingers twiddled with her breasts. She pulled herself free and faced a man with a patch over one eye, the other eye winking suggestively. He said it would be sweet to get to know her better. Although it was an unusually nice way of expressing a need, she refused him with firmness. Too often, out of politeness, she had got herself into difficult situations. ‘I'm so sorry,' she told him, ‘thank you very much, but my husband would get cross.'

She was walking towards Harold when there was a loud disturbance. Hayland was swaying on a beer crate, bellowing for silence. ‘That guy,' he yelled, pointing at someone in the darkness, ‘my buddy, has had his house burnt to the ground.' Murmurs of commiseration rose from the guests.

Rose halted, eyes widening in joy; she was no longer alone.

They were sheltering in the porch of the church, to be out of the rain. She'd been telling him about the row there'd been on Sunday when Auntie Phyllis had come for tea. Mother had cheated at rummy, Father had hurled the playing cards across the brass tray and Auntie Phyllis had gone home crying. ‘Why,' she asked Dr. Wheeler, ‘do people keep hurting each other?' He said, ‘If you want a compass to guide you through life, you have to accustom yourself to looking upon the world as a penal colony. If you abide by this you'll stop regarding disagreeable incidents, sufferings, worries and miseries as anything out of the ordinary. Indeed, you'll realise that everything is as it should be; each of us pays the penalty of existence in our own peculiar way.'

‘I tell you,' bawled Hayland, spitting hatred, ‘that the next time I come across a fucking nigger I'll tear his head from his shoulders. Are you with me?' A boom of support echoed through the trees.

Harold and the man in the baseball cap were now on either side of Rose, each gripping an elbow. ‘Bastard . . . bastard,' Harold shouted, as they hustled her away.

 

 

 

 

 

T
he man who helped escort Rose from the birthday gathering introduced himself as John Fury. He was short and squat and dressed in an expensive, albeit crumpled, white suit. By pro­ fession a lawyer, he said he was now the head of a firm in Los Angeles. He was also a shareholder in a horse farm in Santa Ana, thirty miles outside the city. As a boy Harold had owned a pony, which persuaded him that he and Fury had something in common. They discussed pedigrees, famous races, illustri­ ous mounts.

Rose waltzed about, shadowy under the trees, skirt flap­ ping. For once, she didn't butt in. Harold found it invigorating, conducting a conversation without being subjected to her banal interruptions.

It was a pity time was so short. Fury had an important case to prepare, something to do with fraud, and planned to drive off at first light. He was making for a homestead in the Salmon River mountains to question a woman who was thought to have relevant information.

Harold said, ‘It's great to travel, isn't it? Shaking off famil­ iar things livens the mind.'

‘It sure does,' agreed Fury. ‘Why, yesterday I had the most . . .' He stopped short and smiled sheepishly. Pushing back the brim of his cap, he rubbed his forehead.

‘The most what?' prodded Harold.

‘Odd experience . . . a sort of spiritual awareness. I guess it sounds crazy.'

‘Not so,' Harold assured him.

‘I stopped the car . . . it was in the afternoon . . . near a church. The building was nothing special, yet for some reason I felt impelled to go inside. I'm not a religious man . . . I mean, I believe in God, kind of, but I don't get worked up.'

‘Me neither,' Harold said. He was aware that Rose had stopped dancing and was staring at them.

‘There was some kind of service in progress,' continued Fury, ‘and the organist was playing Bach's Mass in B Minor. You know the one I mean . . .' He began a melancholy humming.

‘Not well,' Harold admitted.

‘It was played at my father's funeral. I confess it reduced me to tears, but then I was very fond of my old man . . . you know how it is.'

‘No,' said Harold. ‘I had too many—fathers, I mean.' Rose was grinning.

Fury bent forward on his stool. He said, ‘I felt a pressure on my back, as if someone was touching me, urging me to stand, and when I did I felt such an overwhelming feeling of light­ ness that I thought I'd left my body behind.'

He stood up, arms outstretched on either side as if prepar­ ing for flight. Then, abruptly, he hunched over, chin on his chest. ‘Seconds later,' he said, ‘an incredible heaviness seized me, as if I was being pushed into the earth.'

Harold remained silent, unsure as to a proper response. He didn't look at Rose.

‘Then I imagined I knew what it was . . . I was facing the Judgment seat . . . being weighed in the balance . . . and found wanting.'

‘Jesus,' murmured Harold, but he wasn't thinking of God.

‘The feeling's still with me,' Fury confided. ‘Now I look at something quite ordinary, that stone, for instance—' he kicked the ground, dislodging soil, ‘and realise it's just as important as myself. I told you it was crazy.' He was still massaging his brow, as if smoothing away thoughts. From the clearing beyond rose the sound of voices raggedly singing ‘Happy Birthday' in honour of Saucy Sue.

Harold stayed mute. For the life of him he couldn't fathom how a man interested in horses could possibly talk such non­ sense. Hearing the whine of a mosquito, he hurried to find his insect spray and spent some time in the camper making sure his skin was adequately protected.

When he returned, Rose was sitting cross-legged at Fury's feet. He was spouting politics.

‘. . . in 1964, McCarthy was elected Senator for Minnesota by the largest majority ever achieved by a Democrat. A man both bold and easily bored, he spoke of giving it all up and going back to being a college professor. Do you know he once referred to the Senate as a leper colony?'

Rose asked, ‘Have you heard that song about a park in a rainstorm?'

Fury stared at her.

‘MacArthur's Park is singing in the rain,' she warbled, ‘I don't think that I can take it, for it took so long to bake it . . . oh no . . . la, la . . .'

Fury said, ‘Though he has a cynical streak, he alone has always been nail-hard against the shoddy thinking in which our foreign policy is rooted, the muddy language in which it is justified—'

‘It isn't explained what he was trying to cook,' Rose inter­ rupted, ‘particularly out in the open.'

‘. . . the bloody consequences to which it has led,' persisted Fury. ‘Vietnam, not least. He was a great friend of the poet, Robert Lowell . . . You've heard of him?'

‘Who hasn't?' said Rose.

‘He wrote verse himself. Do you know the lines: “Searching in attics and sheds of life, salvaging shards and scraps of truth, parts of dead poets, pieces of gods . . .”'

‘Yes, yes,' she enthused. ‘Who could forget a word of Mr. Lowell's.'

‘Lowell didn't write that,' corrected Fury. ‘McCarthy did.'

Perched on his stool, Harold nudged Rose with his foot. She was smiling broadly, as she had been doing most of the evening. It was obvious she found Fury something of a joke, as amusing as that bigoted shit with the red face. To his relief she got to her feet and strolled into the trees. ‘Not too far,' he warned, ‘animals on the prowl.' Not that she deserved protection.

Fury wasn't in a hurry to leave. He confessed he found it uncomfortable sleeping in his car and had arrived too late to rent a cabin. He had a tent, but tents were prohibited on account of the grizzlies. He said he preferred to stay up all night, if Harold had no objection.

‘None at all,' he said.

To his relief Fury kept off the subject of spiritual awareness and concentrated on McCarthy's merits and faults, that and the equally complex personality of Richard Nixon.

‘He's come close, time and time again, to paranoia, but he never quite gives in to it. His style, don't you agree, is a per­ fect mixture of rage and caution?'

Harold said, ‘Sure, but I still hate him.'

‘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.