Uncanny Tales – (28) The Girl in the White Dress

 

It was September 1997; and I was up in London for a meeting with a client in Young Street and I had misjudged the journey time and found myself with sometime to kill.

Princess Diana had died tragically the week before and was lying in Kensington Palace which was only a short walk from my destination.

Although I was not a fan of her, I found her to be manipulative and hypocritical, who would always castigate the media for not respecting her privacy one moment and in the next breath court them to put her latest titbit out in the public domain.

It was however a tragedy and when someone dies before their time there is an added sadness.

So, as I was close by and had time to kill, I decided to go and pay my respects.

It was a glorious day, a real Indian summer day, as I walked through the gardens, and all of a sudden there she was, not Diana obviously, but the girl in the white dress and I was stopped in my tracks.

Not because she was stunningly beautiful, she was indeed an above average, attractive young woman in a long flowing white dress. 

What made her noteworthy was the fact that with the afternoon sun directly behind her, she was suddenly quite naked, to all intents and purposes.

She had stopped to light a cigarette and to the casual observer it would have appeared that I had stopped to watch her smoke it.

Though that wasn’t what I was looking at, and I was not the only man or woman for that matter to be transfixed and mesmerised by what we saw.

This was of course before the fashion of waxing everything had taken hold, certainly with her.

She just continued to stand before us and smoke her cigarette and we just stood there staring.

I don’t quite know how long we would all have stayed there, had a cloud not obscured the sun, but there was an audible sigh from more than one of our group when she was suddenly clothed again.

Sadly, the show was over and we all moved off and as I proceeded to the palace to sign the book of condolence I felt suddenly ashamed at my lascivious behaviour at such a solemn time.

Although the girl in the white dress should have felt more ashamed walking through Kensington Gardens sans underwear.