Felicia's Journey (29 page)

Again there is the ringing of the doorbell, again the attempt to communicate through the letter-box. Protected already by the
Yale and the double lock, he has bolted the door as well, at the top and bottom, and has bolted his back door also. He keeps the curtains drawn across his downstairs windows, but not to disguise the fact that he is in the house: his car on the gravel indicates his presence, and after dark there are chinks of light. It’s just that he likes the curtains drawn now. ‘Hullo, hullo,’ the voice of the black woman booms in the hall until it’s drowned by the voice of Rosemary Clooney.

You could see Beth thinking it; you could see her searching her thoughts and finding it. And Elsie Covington, then the others: they broke in somehow. They trespassed on his privacy even though he took them places and lavished a bit on them in their time of need, the Irish girl too. You could tell, from the way she stood there in her nightdress, that she respected neither his house nor himself because she knew. Beth would have passed it on when she had a drink in; Elsie would have, to some man who picked her up. When the Irish girl went he said he didn’t want the light. But the hall was illuminated behind her, and if she came close to him it would be there again in her eyes. It was because he looked away that she ran off, her footsteps on the gravel, not stopping at the car even though he’d made the car ready for her. It had to be the car; he couldn’t do it in his house, no man could. All he’d asked of her was to get in beside him, no need to say anything, not even that she was sorry.

From the photograph that not long ago he draped with mourning crêpe the faded eyes still twinkle at him, the plump mouth crimped into its winsome pout. ‘Brush Mamma’s hair, dearie,’ a murmur faintly begs. The hair is thick and grey on the pale powdered back, and the blue ribbon is laid out ready on the dressing-table.

‘Hullo, hullo,’ cries the voice in his hall, and then there is the peering through the letter-box.

‘Sir, are you all right?’ Miss Calligary solicitously inquires, and Mr Hilditch stands silent in his hall until the flap of his letter-box clatters back into place and footsteps move away.

‘Come back,’ he whispers then, one hand raised to the Yale latch of the hall door, the other on the key of the double lock. Weeks ago he sought to discover information from this woman that has since shrunk in importance, there now being the more urgent consideration that the girl is still about the place. This woman can lead him to the girl because she knows what the girl looks like and could have seen her around, being always on the streets herself. The girl walked out into that Saturday-night fog, preferring to take chances than to associate with a man whose childhood she knows about through intuition.

‘Come back,’ Mr Hilditch calls out from the steps of his house.

His ponderous form is lit in the open doorway as Miss Calligary and Marcia Tibbitts turn to retrace their steps. The Irish girl, he says: the Irish girl is alive.

‘That girl’s a bit of no good, sir.’ And Miss Calligary adds that such a girl can work a trick with both eyes closed.

He doesn’t appear to hear. On his chin and his forehead there is a glistening of sweat. It was they who disturbed the calm, he says, by referring to the Irish girl in the first place. It was they who caused a muddle where there was peace of mind before. Where is the Irish girl now?

‘Sir,’ Miss Calligary interrupts, but he shakes his head and the eyes of Marcia Tibbitts pass from one face to another, excited because something strange is happening here.

‘Tell me the truth,’ the man begs. ‘I am a catering manager. I have lived in this house all my days. I am a respectable man. Hilditch I am called.’

‘Mr Hilditch, we’re concerned for you. Why not kneel down with us? Why not permit us to ask for guidance?’

‘Is the Irish girl with you? Has she returned to your house?’

‘No, no. She’s not with us now. That girl wouldn’t be welcome.’

‘Where is she then? Where has she gone to? You are out and about, you know what she looks like.’

‘No one has seen the girl, sir. No one knows.’ Surely, Miss Calligary suggests, the girl is back in her Irish home by now.

‘She has no money.’

‘A girl like that can always get money.’

‘Her boyfriend drinks in the Goose and Gander. Out Hinley way, a squaddies’ pub. A stone’s throw from the barracks.’

He visited the place, Mr Hilditch divulges. He sat drinking a mineral in the Goose and Gander.

‘Because you’re teetotal, sir? You drink a mineral because you have put strong drink to one side?’

Mr Hilditch says no. He sat in the Goose and Gander because of a compulsion, which afterwards he realized had to do with the possibility that the Irish girl had noticed an army lorry going by, as sometimes an army lorry does. It had to do with it dawning on her then that her father’s statements concerning her boyfriend’s occupation were well founded. It had to do with her making inquiries and being led into her boyfriend’s company.

‘Mr Hilditch –’

‘You have driven me to the medical shelves with all your bothering of me.’

‘You’ve got this wrong, Mr Hilditch. It was never my intention to drive you anywhere. I don’t even know what you mean by that.’

‘You brought the subject of the girl up. Day and night, you kept mentioning her.’

‘Mr Hilditch, we mentioned that girl to you in order to compliment you on your charity. We have come to gather you, Mr Hilditch, as we come every day to the houses of other folk. Nothing to do with a dishonest girl.’

Mr Hilditch shakes his head. He shows his finger, where he cut it on a pilchards tin. The blood dripped on to the draining-board, he says, causing him to wonder about it and to wonder about the open flesh. He adds, to Marcia Tibbitts’ greater excitement:

‘You have come to convey me to my coffin.’

‘No, no, sir. It is the living we gather to us, not the dead. These are morbid thoughts, without the joy that makes all things beautiful. You are not yourself. I have seen that and have said it.’

‘That girl told me things about herself. She told me how her mother died and how the old woman lived on, and how her father pasted up his scrapbooks. She walked out into the Saturday-night
fog in order to take another lift in my car, but for reasons of her own she walked past it.’

He continues to speak. Hilditch his name is, he says again. Joseph Ambrose, called after a newscaster, a cat burglar in his off-time. Felicia the Irish girl is, a name unfamiliar to him, the name of a woman revolutionary. Strange when you think of it, how people are given their names. Strange, how people are allocated a life. Strange, what happens to people, the Irish girl and himself for starters. All he needs is to know where she is now.

‘It would definitely be a help to you, Mr Hilditch, if we showed you the way to the Gathering House so that you could call in at any time. There are kindly folk on hand to bring back to you your peace of mind.’

‘I can hear her now,’ is Mr Hilditch’s response, delighting Marcia Tibbitts further. ‘Her footsteps on the gravel.’ He walked back into his house that night and the black bar of the fire-grate was on the tiles where she’d dropped it.

‘Mr Hilditch, this girl –’

‘I took her money to keep her by me, but even so she went away.’

Here is a mad man, Marcia Tibbitts comments to herself, the first she has ever been on a doorstep with. And Miss Calligary, experienced in such matters, recognizes a ring of truth in the last statement that has been made to her, and in less than several seconds she says to herself that this man is not as he seems. From his own mouth has come a confession to leave you gasping. He has stolen a girl’s money for some heinous purpose, causing a girl to be maligned in the thoughts of others. Miss Calligary requests a repetition of the statement, to ensure beyond doubt that it has been as she heard it. Quieter now, the man says he suffers from delusions. He gets things wrong, he says, and then abruptly turns his back.

Treachery was the word he used, in private, the day he knew about his Uncle Wilf. Guide and friend, his Uncle Wilf had called himself, and who could have said it wasn’t true? He’d been the source of knowledge about the regimental life, an inspiration in
that respect. ‘Always been an army family,’ his Uncle Wilf said, but he was making it up as he went along. Everything fell to bits then: there’d been no army family, nothing like that; it wasn’t to be a guide and a friend that his Uncle Wilf had been coming to the house all these years, it wasn’t to encourage a vocation. Bit on the side, until he didn’t fancy it any more and never came back again. ‘Be nice, dear,’ the ginny rasp whispers again, that special voice.

He bangs his hall door shut as soon as he sees it in the black woman’s eyes. Of course it wasn’t feet and short sight: God knows what talk had got around, God knows what the recruiting officer’s opinion had been. All lies, what the black woman said about not running into the girl again. The black woman knows; that’s why she comes to his door. In her black imagination there is the lipstick tattoo, and the blue ribbon laid out on the dressing-table, and the little-boy hands that always have remained so, clothes falling from a woman’s body, the nakedness beneath. There is that odour of scent, of powder too, in the black woman’s nostrils, and it’s there among the employees, in the canteen and in the kitchens and the painting bays and the offices. There’s the whisper, going on and on, the words there were, his own obedience. ‘Be nice, dear,’ in the special voice, the promise that the request will never be made again, broken every time.

It never was his fault that there was prying later on, after years and years; that there is prying still. Each time he hoped there wouldn’t be. Each time he hoped that a friendship would last for ever, that two people could be of help to one another, that strangers seeing them together would say they belonged like that.

No one passing by in Duke of Wellington Road, no hurrying housewife, or child, or business person, no one who can see Number Three from the top of the buses that ply to and fro on a nearby street, has reason to wonder about this house or its single occupant. No one passing is aware that a catering manager from a factory, well liked and without enemies, is capable of suffering no more.

In the cavernous kitchen of this house Mr Hilditch’s shoes are neatly laced and the laces neatly tied. His socks are chequered
below the turn-ups of his trousers. The suit is his usual blue serge, its waistcoat fastened but for the button at the bottom. His shirt is clean, the cufflinks in the cuffs. The tie is the striped one he always wears. His glasses are in place. He shaved himself an hour ago.

The back door is no longer bolted, in fact is slightly open, thoughtfully left so. A light that in the darkness lit the dustbins in the small backyard and glanced over an edge of laurel and mahonia remains unextinguished. In the kitchen there is no sound.

When twilight comes again a scavenging cat, earlier attracted by the open door, returns and this time slinks through it. Black, with a collar that once had a bell attached to it, this cat has long ago strayed from a domestic life too soft to satisfy the instincts of its feline nature. Soundlessly, it tours the kitchen, leaping from time to time on to different surfaces until its survey is complete. Its green, lozenge eyes pass over the crockery of the dresser and the white enamel of the electric stove, over wall cupboards and shelves, the taps above the sink, the wooden chairs, the table on which another chair is overturned, a human body hanging. This is suspended from the single ham hook in the wooden ceiling by a length of electric flex, the head slung forward awkwardly, the mound of flesh beneath the chin wedging the sideways tilt. It isn’t of interest to the scavenging cat. Nothing is of interest except a saucepan on the stove, with a little milk left in it.

24

The convent girls climb up St Joseph’s Hill, hurrying while the bell still tolls. Their conversation is breathless as they turn in at the convent gates, feet running now, faces flushed. Sister Benedict awaits them by the window of a classroom, where other girls are already assembled. A distant figure digs the patch where soon the first of the maincrop potatoes will be planted. Reminded by this figure of the missing girl, Sister Benedict prays.

In Hickey’s Hotel a traveller in office stationery, coughing through cigarette smoke over the remains of a late breakfast, checks his call-book for the day. Above the cycle and pram shop, Connie Jo experiences the morning nausea that her friend, then newly her sister-in-law, experienced five months ago. At Flanagan’s Quarries the lorries are loaded with chippings while the drivers wait beside them, silently smoking. In the Co-op yard Shay Mulroone fork-lifts bales of sheep wire. ‘God, she’s a cracker,’ Small Crowley confides elsewhere; and Carmel, of whom he speaks, mops a floor at the hospital and worries a little about being a cracker perhaps once too often.

The old woman dies on the day before her hundredth birthday. The stiffened body is taken from the bedroom, and the bedroom is empty now. An irony, the general opinion is, being taken at this particular time, but there it is.

One night the boots of the big twin brothers thump into Johnny Lysaght’s stomach and his ribs, and he lies insensible in the dark, by the memorial statue in the Square. Blood oozes from his face, an eye is closed beneath contusions. The cigarettes have not been removed from his attackers’ lips while the punishment was meted out. No word has been spoken. The unconscious youth remains where he has fallen, and the glasses that have been left waiting in Myles Brady’s bar are emptied and then replenished.