Felicia's Journey (25 page)

‘Oh yes, there’s been changes,’ the woman using the cash dispenser agrees, arranging four five-pound notes in the wallet of her purse. ‘Can’t say there hasn’t been changes.’

‘No more than eight years of age,’ Mr Hilditch volunteers. ‘Used to come down on the train.’

‘Out of all recognition in that case. No argument on that.’

She is a woman with spectacles, older than Mr Hilditch, with a basket on wheels, grey lisle stockings and a fuzzy grey coat. Her hair is grey and fuzzy also.

‘Thought I’d come back,’ Mr Hilditch continues, not yet inserting his plastic card in the cash dispenser. ‘Lift the spirits, I said to myself, to visit the Spa.’

‘Nothing much of a spa about it these days. They packed that in donkeys ago.’

‘The springs dried up, eh?’

‘Never was no springs, some geezer fixed it. People’d believe anything in them days.’

‘Mother did.’

‘Well, there you go then. No more’n a con.’

‘Mother said it did her good.’

‘There’s a lot that’s in the mind when it comes to a sickness.’

‘There probably is.’

‘It was Len was a great believer in that. All in the mind was the expression he had for it.’

‘Your husband would this be?’

‘Late. 1970.’

Mr Hilditch presses his plastic into the slot and registers his personal identification number, 9165. The woman draws on grey gloves and seizes the handle of her mobile shopping basket. Notes to the value of forty pounds emerge from the wall.

‘A great convenience,’ Mr Hilditch remarks, agreeable to prolonging the encounter. ‘Our flexible friend.’

‘You spend too much’s the only thing. If it wasn’t there you’d be better off.’

‘Fancy a coffee?’

The woman hesitates. She doesn’t reply, but she raises no objection when Mr Hilditch falls into step with her. He couldn’t agree with her more, he declares; cash dispensers induce you to spend too much by making your money so readily available. The banks know what they’re doing, he suggests, and outside a store
which he imagines will have a refreshment floor he repeats his invitation.

‘I’m not fussy,’ the woman says, preceding him through swing doors.

It came to him in the early morning that he’d drive over to the Spa, the day being a Saturday. A change was what he needed, an outing to somewhere that belonged to some other time of his life. Two hours it took in the car; longer, with a change and a wait, it used to be by train.

‘Well, this is nice,’ he remarks with genuine enthusiasm when they are seated. ‘I enjoy a mid-morning cup.’

‘It warms you, this weather.’

This woman is flattered: he can tell that by the way she looks about her to see if they have been noticed by anyone she knows. It was the same on the street. She would enjoy people speculating as to who the stranger is, a good ten years he could give her. He says:

‘I should have commiserated about your husband. Sorry about that.’

‘It’s twenty-two years. You get over it.’

‘Even so I should have said something.’

‘No call for it really.’

‘Even so I’m sorry.’ And since the subject is there, he states that he never married himself.

‘No more’ Vera did. Wouldn’t touch it, according to herself.’

‘A daughter, is this?’

‘A sister as was. We never got on, never saw eye to eye.’

Their coffee arrives. Mr Hilditch feels the first stirrings of appetite for several weeks and asks if there are cheese scones available. ‘I was up at all hours,’ he explains, apologetically, to his companion.

‘She wanted Len is my own belief, and when she couldn’t get him that was that. Wouldn’t touch it once she couldn’t get Len.’

In the course of further conversation Mr Hilditch voluntarily supplies his name, and the information that he is a catering manager. He gives the name of the town where he lives and works, adding that he was born there, population well over a quarter of a million these days and growing all the time. He butters three
cheese scones while he is relaying this information, pleasurably watching the butter melt on the warm surface. Not once since he dropped into conversation with the greyly clad woman has he been harassed by the annoyance that keeps him awake at night and confuses him in the daytime.

‘It was always his ambition,’ she is saying now, ‘to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.’

‘This is your husband, is it?’

‘His great ambition and of course she played on it. Brazen in that respect. Read up on the subject – the names of the hanging plants or whatever it is they have.’

He nods understandingly.

‘I have to employ a lot for the kitchens. Any forward type of woman wouldn’t stand a chance. It’s one of the little rules I have.’

‘The last words she spoke. “I’ll have him now,” she said. Brazen to the end.’

Soon after this the woman announces that she has to be getting on and, since the encounter cannot be further prolonged, Mr Hilditch smiles agreeably and says their meeting has been a pleasure. He remains at the table, buttering the last scone when the woman has passed out of sight. Almost immediately, the annoyance that her company has kept at bay returns.

It accompanies Mr Hilditch as this day wears on, and the appetite that came back so briefly does not do so again. He distracts himself as best he can: it isn’t difficult to believe that some enterprising businessman once upon a time created a myth about a local water source, deluding the afflicted for generations. He thinks about that for a while, then slips into his private past. ‘That’s a public toilet,’ his mother pointed out the first time they came here, indicating a brick building near the railings of a park. ‘Remember where it is, dearie.’ She had a cameo brooch pinned to her lapel and a double necklace of pearls. She carried her bathing costume in a little blue suitcase, with the sandwiches she always brought, and a flask of tea. At the station buffet she had a gin and pep while they waited for the train, and another when they changed and had to wait again.

Mr Hilditch attends the two o’clock showing of
Basic Instinct
and
finds it unpleasant, but remains to the end since he has paid his money. Then he walks about the streets, admiring the terraces of pale, pretty houses with fanlights, the pillars that distinguish crescents and parades, the lofty statue of Queen Victoria in front of the town hall. But neither all that nor what remains with him of
Basic Instinct
is as efficacious as his companion of the morning in combating the intrusion that distresses him. As the shops begin to close, he judges the day a failure.

Driving home again, he remembers Beth saying goodbye, the last moment before memory became too painful. She broke it to him suddenly: that tomorrow she planned to go south. Jakki said it first thing when he met her one evening, outside the home-decorating shop where they always met. Sharon didn’t tell him at all, and intended not to, but he guessed. Bobbi was the most casual. Elsie Covington said she’d miss him. Gaye cried, putting it on because she wanted money before she went.

They are there, standing by his hall door, their backs to him at first, then turning to face him when they hear the car on the gravel. Their two faces are caught in the headlights, the one black and gleaming, thick lips drawn back, the other timidly peering at the glare. He has a few times wondered about their threatened return, resolving not to answer the doorbell without first ascertaining who was there. Slowly, tiredly, he switches off the engine of the car and extinguishes the lights.

‘Sir, we are happy to see you.’ The black woman speaks as soon as he steps on to the gravel.

He locks the car door, then turns to shake his head at her smiling face. He doesn’t smile himself. He’s not in the mood for this: he lets that be seen.

‘Ten minutes out of your day, sir –’

‘My day has been a long one. I must wish you good-night. I must request you not to come bothering me again.’

‘Have you taken the opportunity to meditate on the story of Miss Marcia Tibbitts? As we agreed, sir?’

‘I didn’t agree to anything.’

‘A while back we called to see you, sir —’

‘Yes, I know, I know.’

‘We have been anxious to hear how my young friend’s tale has affected your troubled heart, sir.’

Mr Hilditch is startled by this. His small eyes stare at Miss Calligary until he blinks in an effort to shake out of them the consternation he is unable to disguise.

‘Troubled?’ The word escapes from him without his wishing it to, his lips unconsciously giving voice to his alarm.

‘Sir, the girl you were a helpmeet to was not of our Church. A lodger only in our house, sir. Just passing by.’

‘You’ve got all this wrong —’

‘That girl makes a song and dance that she is stolen from, expecting a whip-round in the Gathering House.’

‘I’m telling you you’ve got your wires crossed.’

‘If she said different from just passing by it isn’t true. Better to consider my young friend here tonight, sir. Better to consider her joy as she stands before you.’

The girl isn’t much to look at. Her nondescript hair grows in a widow’s peak and is pulled straight back and held with hair-clips. She is a small, rabbity girl.

‘Consider her daily trade, sir, before she came to know the promise of the Father Lord. Consider the grisly acts she sold across the counter, sir. Decapitation and viciousness, harems of animals. Unnatural practices, sir, the excitements of pain.’

Mr Hilditch, hardly hearing what is said, continues to observe the small girl. He wonders if she’ll pass on from the people she has fallen in with and end up roaming. She has the look of that, an empty look that is familiar to him.

‘Soon the folk will come from all over for our Prayer Jubilee. May I ask you, sir, if you have rooms going spare in your house?’

‘Rooms? What’re you talking about?’

‘Sir, the folk come to rejoice.’

Mr Hilditch wants to push past them and unlock his hall door and then to bang it in their faces. He wants to say that he will summon the police unless they go away, that they have no right to harass a person on his doorstep, that they are trespassing on
private property. But no words come and he does not move forward.

‘For the future is written, sir, in the writing of certainty. There is fruit for all, heavy on the trees. And the green hills stretch to the horizon, and the corn is lifted from the land. See the foxes, sir, tamed in their holes, and the geese happy in the farmyard barn. Hear the cries of the children at play, and the voices raised in song for the Father Lord. That is the promise, sir. That is the future for the one who dies.’

‘Why are you talking to me like this?’ Hoarsely, and again involuntarily, the question escapes from him, asked before he realizes it. His voice sounds as though it is someone else’s, some angry person shouting. He does not mean to shout. ‘Why do you keep coming here? What do you want with me?’

He pushes past them then, roughly elbowing between them. He drops his car keys and the girl picks them up and hands them to him, her fingers touching his but he doesn’t notice.

‘Do not come back here,’ he brusquely orders. ‘I don’t want to see you here again.’

Unperturbed and undismayed, Miss Calligary advises him to consider what has been said. None of us can flee the one who dies, she asserts, for the one who dies awaits us when we, too, have been cleansed and are ready for the paradise earth. And then, as though there has been no objection to the visit, no turbulence or crossness, Miss Calligary adds:

‘There is solace for the troubled, sir.’

A black hand is laid on Mr Hilditch’s arm. Miss Calligary’s even teeth are again on display. Marcia Tibbitts is writing in a jotter.

‘What’s she doing? What’s she writing down? This is a private house, you know.’

‘What is written is the address, sir – 3 Duke of Wellington, and the number of folk you have room for when the Jubilee is at hand. Sir, with the folk around you, you would soon discover a heart-ease. Until that time come we will not desert you.’

Mr Hilditch’s hands are shaking, so much so that he cannot fit
the keys into the locks of his door. He is obliged to turn his back in order to hide his agitation, and to steady one hand with the other. He does not respond to the request that he should lodge people in his house.

In the Gathering House Miss Calligary reflects upon the irrational behaviour of the man who occupies 3 Duke of Wellington Road. Her efforts to rectify any misunderstanding there might have been inspired a response that causes her now to believe there was no such misunderstanding in the first place. Something else is the matter. When first they called on the man he refrained from interrupting Marcia Tibbitts’ personal saga, and while it is true that he made some small protestation when it came to an end, the nature of this was not out of the ordinary. Indeed, in Miss Calligary’s experience the more opposition there initially is the greater the conviction later. The intimation she experienced after their first encounter – that the man would sooner or later enter what the Priscatts call ‘a relationship’ with the Church that is her life’s work – is something she now finds herself questioning: clearly, more work needs to be done. For not only has the fellowship she offered been peremptorily rejected, it appears to have become a cause of alarm. Miss Calligary has more than once explained to the young companions who bear the Message with her that you can’t hope to get anywhere unless you persevere, that a lack of interest, even abuse, should not be permitted to upset or dishearten. But alarm is quite another matter; as a reaction, she has not experienced it before.