THE GIRL IN THE POLKA-DOT DRESS

After a period of late productivity Beryl Bainbridge's writing again slowed down in the last decade of her life. Poor health and an abandoned manuscript meant that deadlines were continually pushed back, and when Bainbridge did settle on an idea it proved to be slow work. The novel she was working on remained unfinished at her death in 2010 but was prepared for publication by her friend and editor Brendan King and posthumously published in 2011. The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress is set in the United States during the campaign for the 1968 Democratic Party presidential nomination. It takes inspiration – as well as its title – from eyewitness reports suggesting that a woman wearing a polka-dot dress was seen at the Ambassador Hotel talking with Sirhan Sirhan moments before he assassinated Robert Kennedy. One witness, a campaign worker named Sandra Serrano, claimed that she later saw this woman fleeing the hotel and shouting, ‘We shot him!’ Bainbridge's novel builds towards this event but never reaches it, though a facsimile of a 1968 Los Angeles Times article is included as an epilogue; it reports Serrano's claims and hints at the direction the novel was to take had Bainbridge had time to complete it. In a 2008 interview Bainbridge suggested that the novel would end with her heroine, Rose, inadvertently abetting Kennedy's murder by pushing Sirhan's gun away from his real target, Dr Wheeler, a man from her past for whom she has been searching on her travels (Marsh).

The plot of The Girl in the Polka-dot Dress, centring on a conspiracy theory and set in America, may seem like an unlikely departure for Bainbridge, but in many ways it is a return to ideas, incidents and characters from her earlier work. Rose is at once naı¨ve and worldly, ignorant and insightful, and Bainbridge has suggested that, like many of her early characters, she is a portrait of her younger self (Marsh). Some of the locations are also familiar, and in a series of flashbacks Bainbridge returns to the coast and pine forests of her childhood, to parents in brooding conflict with one another, and to her experiences with an older man – Dr Wheeler – whom Bainbridge described as another version of the Tsar in Harriet Said … (Marsh).