The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress Read Free

been London, except for the mailboxes on stilts and the length of
     the cars. At a crossing near a furniture store they were halted by three men in yellow
     oilskins diverting the traf­ fic. Ahead, black smoke curled into the sky.
    Harold swore and reversed into a side street. He said there was a
     disturbance downtown. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, there were riots
     all over the States. Being so close to Washington, Baltimore was particularly affected. ‘The
     negroes aren’t putting up with it any more,’ he said. ‘They’ve had enough.’
    â€˜Where I was born,’ Rose told him, ‘there were lots of coloured
     people. We never really noticed them.’
    She was taken aback by Harold’s apartment. Having only films to go
     on, she was not prepared for the drabness of his sitting room. It had a naked bulb hanging
     from the high ceiling and a sofa draped in a yellow blanket. Above the electric fire,
     propped on a shelf, was a dull picture of a house on a hill. The wall behind the cooker was
     spattered with fat.
    â€˜It’s very cosy,’ she said.
    â€˜Not a word I’d use,’ he said.
    She wanted to lie down, anywhere, preferably on the floor. The sofa
     she sat on had something harsh thrusting through the blanket. ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘I must
     rest,’ but he insisted she should eat something first. She didn’t know him well enough to
     argue.
    It took him time to grill the meat. When he peeled the onions he
     mopped his watery eyes with his fingers, and then wiped them on the front of his trousers.
     Everything he did was slow and measured, as though he was sleepwalking. She had to keep
     talking because he hardly ever spoke, and how could she remain silent in this stranger’s
     room, a stranger who had paid out so much money to bring her here? She asked him
     questions—how long had he lived in this house, how much did the flat cost? In the
     circumstances, it was absurd she knew so little about his life.
    Usually, with a few words, she provoked conversation, but not this
     time. The only thing that aroused a response was when she wanted to know if he’d always
     travelled a lot. That’s when he told her he’d gone to Chicago a month past to look for Dr.
     Wheeler. He hadn’t found him, of course, because her letter informing him that Wheeler had
     moved to Washington had arrived too late.
    Again she apologised, squirming on the uncomfortable sofa.
    â€˜You needing the bathroom?’ Harold asked. ‘It’s through there.’
    When she stood, she noticed him look at her legs, quickly and away
     again, not boldly.
    The bathroom was tiled and none too clean. There was a torn curtain
     of plastic slung sideways from the bath. The tub, similar to the one she used in Kentish
     Town, stood on cast-iron legs, old and rusted. Judging from the state of the toilet bowl,
     Americans didn’t know about Vim. Which was funny seeing the way Harold, the evening she had
     invited him in for a coffee, had rubbed his finger across her bedside table and commented on
     the grime.
    He’d been staying with her friends Polly and Bernard, and she’d
     been asked round for dinner to make a foursome. She hadn’t really wanted to go because of
     the name Grasse, which she reckoned sounded German. While she was still at school her class
     had been marched in crocodile to the Philharmonic Hall to watch a film to do with British
     soldiers tidying up a concentration camp. There were bulldozers raking up funny scarecrows
     and tipping them into pits. Later, Mavis, the head prefect, said they were dead bodies.
     Nobody could possibly be friendly with a Jerry, not when one knew what had happened to the
     Jews. But then Polly told her Washington Harold was himself Jewish, so that made it all
     right.
    After the meal, it was suggested that Harold should escort her
     home; the road past the bread factory