Felicia's Journey (2 page)

‘I’ll just jot down your address in Ireland,’ he says.

She says she is from Mountmellick, the first town that comes into her head. She gives an address she makes up: 23 St Mary’s Terrace.

‘Right,’ the security man says.

No one stops her at the Customs. She asks where the trains go from, and is directed. When she makes further inquiries she is informed that the train for Birmingham isn’t due to leave until a quarter past two. It is now just after midnight.

For a while, in the waiting-room, she sleeps. She dreams: that she is shopping for meat in Scaddan’s, that Mr Scaddan thumps a huge cut of liver on to the weighing-scales and says he took it out of the bullock himself. This isn’t true; in her dream she is aware that it isn’t; Mr Scaddan is well known for his tall stories. One of the young Christian Brothers comes into the shop and Mr Scaddan says it is a disgrace, but she doesn’t know what the butcher is talking about. ‘I was out for a walk one night,’ he says to the Christian Brother. ‘Down by the old gasworks.’ She knows then.

The train comes in, long before it’s due to go out again. Felicia makes certain it is the right one, and when the journey begins she falls asleep again. Wakened by the ticket-collector, she is drowsily confused for a moment, not knowing where she is. The man is patient while she searches in her handbag for her ticket. Her mother’s calm features are snagged in her consciousness, the residue of another dream.

‘Thank you,’ the man says, passing on.

The dream about her mother has gone; but although she cannot recall what it was about, it has stirred her memory. ‘Hurry now, for Mrs Quigly,’ her great-grandmother ordered her that day, ages ago. ‘And tell Father Kilgallen he’s wanted quickly.’ The old woman was holding a cup of tea to her mother’s lips and her mother’s eyes were half closed; her cheeks were the colour of cement. ‘Mrs Quigly! Mrs Quigly!’ She was six that day, banging the letter-box of the house next door. Later she had to run to keep up with Father Kilgallen’s urgent stride in Main Street and the
Square, and when they got to the house Mrs Quigly and the old woman helped her mother into the bedroom. Father Kilgallen whispered there, and then her brothers came in from the Christian Brothers’ and Aidan went to get her father from the convent garden. It was her father who drew the sheet over her mother’s face, a last few minutes he had with her while they waited in the kitchen and Aidan cried. The satchel with her schoolbooks in it was on the floor where she had dropped it, light-blue and shiny, Minnie Mouse with pink shoes on the flap. ‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Quigly said, taking her apron off after she’d crossed herself, the flowers on it too garish now. ‘Thank God,’ Father Kilgallen said because he had arrived in time. ‘I’ve outlived another one,’ the old woman said.

The train judders on, rattling on the rails, slowing almost to a halt, gathering speed again. Felicia opens her eyes. A hazy dawn is distributing farmhouses and silos and humped barns in shadowy fields. Later, there are long lines of motor cars creeping slowly on nearby roads, and blank early-morning faces at railway stations. Pylons and aerials clutter a skyline, birds scavenge at a rubbish tip. There’s never a stretch of empty countryside.

The train fills up. Newspapers are read in silence, eyes that meet by accident at once averted. Everything – people and houses and motorcars, pylons and aerials – are packed together as if there isn’t quite enough room to accommodate them. Faces acquire an edginess when the train threatens to stop even though it isn’t at a station.

Johnny will be going to work, too: Felicia imagines him, hurrying as everyone else is, but carefree, not worrying about it, because that is his way. For as long as she can she retains an image of his easy-going expression, then of his profile the afternoon he took the bus himself, the last time she saw him, when he didn’t know she was still in the Square; as a faraway, whispering echo, there is the murmur of his voice.

2

Although he does not know it, Mr Hilditch weighs nineteen and a half stone, a total that has been steady for more than a dozen years, rarely increasing or decreasing by as much as a pound. Christened Joseph Ambrose fifty-four years ago, Mr Hilditch wears spectacles that have a pebbly look, keeps his pigeon-coloured hair short, dresses always in a suit with a waistcoat, ties his striped tie into a tight little knot, polishes his shoes twice a day, and is given to smiling pleasantly. Regularly, the fat that bulges about his features is rolled back and well-kept teeth appear, while a twinkle livens the blurred pupils behind his spectacles. His voice is faintly high-pitched.

Mr Hilditch’s hands are small, seeming not to belong to the rest of him: deft, delicate fingers that can insert a battery into a watch or tidily truss a chicken, this latter a useful accomplishment, for of all things in the world Mr Hilditch enjoys eating. Often considering that he has not consumed sufficient during the course of a meal, he treats himself to a Bounty bar or a Mars or a packet of biscuits. The appreciation of food, he calls it privately.

Once an invoice clerk, Mr Hilditch is now, suitably, a catering manager. Fifteen years ago, when his predecessor in this position retired, he was summoned by the factory management and the notion of a change of occupation was put to him. As he well knew, the policy was that vacancies, where possible, should be filled from within, and his interest in meals and comestibles had not gone unnoticed; all that was necessary was that he should go on a brief catering course. For his part, he was aware that computers were increasingly taking their toll of office staff and when the offer was made he knew better than to hesitate: as a reward for long and satisfactory service, redundancy was being forestalled.

Mr Hilditch occupies on his own a detached house standing in shrubberies that run all around it, Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road. In 1979 his mother died in this house; he never knew his father. Left on his own at the time of the death, he committed to auction the furniture that had accumulated in his mother’s lifetime and from then on made Number Three solely his. Visiting salerooms at weekends, he filled it with articles, large and small, all of them to his personal taste: huge mahogany cupboards and chests, ivory trinkets for his mantelpieces, secondhand Indian carpets, and elaborately framed portraits of strangers. Twenty mezzotints of South African military scenes decorate the staircase wall, an umbrella-stand in marble and mahogany vies for pride of place with a set of antlers in a spacious hallway. Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road is commodious enough to contain all Mr Hilditch has purchased: built in 1867 to the designs of a tea merchant, it spreads from this lofty entrance hall to kitchen and pantries at the back, and reception rooms of generous proportions to the left and right of the hall door. Upstairs, that generosity is repeated. Four bedrooms open off the first-floor landing, with a further four above them. Ceilings are rich in plasterwork mouldings and cornices. Ornate gas lamps, no longer in use, still protrude from the walls. Mr Hilditch regularly dusts them, an attention that over the years has resulted in a dull glow on the protuberances of the decoration. In spring and summer he attends to the shrubberies, keeping them clear of weeds, though not growing anything new. He sweeps up the fallen leaves in autumn and from time to time repairs the wooden boundary fences.

The private life of Mr Hilditch is on the one hand ordinary and expected, on the other secretive. To his colleagues at the factory he appears to be, in essence, as jovial and agreeable as his exterior intimates. His bulk suggests a man careless of his own longevity, his smiling presence indicates an extrovert philosophy. But Mr Hilditch, in his lone moments, is often brought closer to other, darker, aspects of the depths that lie within him. When a smile no longer matters he can be a melancholy man.

But on a Wednesday morning in February Mr Hilditch is aware of considerable elation: once a fortnight on Wednesdays the
factory lunch includes turkey pie, and a fortnight has passed since it was on the menu. He dwells upon this fact as he fries his breakfast eggs and sausages and bacon, and toasts pieces of thick-sliced Mother’s Pride. It lingers in his thoughts while he eats in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat at the kitchen table, and while he washes up at the sink. Temporarily, at least, the anticipated lunchtime dish recedes then. He lowers the drying-rack from the ceiling, drapes the tea-cloth he has used over a rail and raises the rack again. He visits the lavatory with the
Daily Telegraph
, and soon afterwards lets himself out of his front door, double-locking it behind him. His small green car is waiting on the gravelled driveway. The shrubberies that shield the house from the street are dank and dripping on a misty morning.

Mr Hilditch drives slowly, as his habit is: he never drives fast, he sees no point in it. Being of the neighbourhood, born and bred in the town he now passes through, he has seen some changes. The most lasting, and fundamental, occurred in the decade of the 1950s when the town expanded and was to a considerable degree rebuilt in order to house and facilitate the employees of the factories that arrived in the area during that time. These factories are different from those that distinguished the town in the past, their manufacturing processes being of a lighter nature. Now, there is plain, similar architecture everywhere, shops and office blocks laid out in a grid of straight lines, intersections at right angles. Wide pedestrian walkways were planted in the 1950s with shrubs and flowers in long, raised central beds; and the new town’s architects included burgeoning arcades, and hanging baskets on the street lights. Since then the soil has soured in the long raised beds; heathers have died there, leaving only browned strands behind, among which beer cans and discarded containers of instant food provide what splashes of colour there are. The flowered arcades are bare metal arches, the hanging baskets rusty. But paint-gun graffiti enliven the smooth brown concrete of a sculptured group – man, woman and child in stylized lumbering gait,
en route
from the post office to a multistorey car park. Among low-slung office blocks an ersatz mosaic patterns the wall of a chain-store. Familiar logos – of shops and banks and building societies – snappily claim attention.

In Mr Hilditch’s opinion the town is a city and should be known as such. It is the size of a city and has a city’s population, but it does not possess a cathedral, which someone – his Uncle Wilf, as far as he can remember – once pointed out is the stipulation where urban status is concerned. Instead, there are six churches, four of different denominations, a synagogue and a mosque. There is a leisure centre, completed in 1981, which Mr Hilditch has never entered and considers a waste of public money.

He passes it now, then skirts the central area and patiently waits at the roundabout where traffic at this particular time of the morning invariably comes to a halt. After that the journey is easier, and within minutes he is driving through yellow factory gates. He parks where the registration number of his car is painted on the tarmac, and walks at an unhurried pace to his office – a partitioned corner of what was once a larger office – beyond the loading bays. As an invoice clerk in the old days, he worked there before all the partitioning went up, with seven other clerks in the same office space, each at a desk.

Just before midday on this Wednesday – a day that so far strikes Mr Hilditch as being in no way special apart from the promise of turkey pie – he makes his way to the kitchens in order to taste the lunchtime menu in full. Beginning with the pie, he passes from flaky crust to meat, then sips the gravy. An alternative dish is a casserole of beef diced with vegetables: dutifully, he samples this also – and potatoes, roasted and mashed, Brussels sprouts and parsnips. ‘Splendid,’ Mr Hilditch compliments his cooks. ‘Good show.’ He tries the raspberry-jam steamed pudding, the custard, and the apple crumble. He examines a costing print-out of each dish separately calculated, labour and electricity costs, ingredients as an individual total. His task is to avoid a loss – a task in which his predecessor was rarely successful – and over fifteen years he has done so, responsible for a transformation in the factory’s catering accounts that has not gone unacknowledged.

‘Good, that’s very good,’ he pronounces when he has glanced through the figures, the pleasant taste of raspberry jam still clinging to his palate. He smiles as he hands back the papers, reflecting that he will certainly go for the raspberry steamed pudding when he
makes his choice of what to have after the turkey pie. He ambles about the huge, greasy kitchens for a few more moments, genially chatting to the cooking staff, who are part-time women mostly. Then, his appetite whetted, he makes his way to the canteen. It pleases him to be first in the canteen every day: he feels it emphasizes his position and draws attention to the fact that this hour of relaxation for all the factory workers, no matter what their status, is ordained by him. There is a dining-room for the managerial staff which he has a right to use but never does. The food is identical in both places.

At ten to one the shop-floor hooters sound, and soon after that the workers arrive, men and women, girls and apprentices. They queue up with trays at the long counter, shouting at one another, sharing jokes and mild obscenities. Mr Hilditch smiles at individuals as they pass close to where he sits, all of them in their working clothes, some with the
Sun
or the
Daily Mirror
under an arm. They trust him, he feels. They trust the food for which he is ultimately responsible because from experience they know they can, and that gives him pleasure. He can’t imagine his existence now if he had remained an invoice clerk. Head of Invoices he would have become in time, but only his close associates would have known that such a title existed. There would have been no question of a place in the managerial dining-room, or the luxury of rejecting it.