Felicia's Journey (11 page)

When, without warning, she begins to cry, the flesh of Mr Hilditch’s face creases in sympathy, puffing up around his tiny eyes. Between sobs he hears about a breakdown of communication, how the boyfriend failed to leave an address or telephone number behind, how she’d been frightened of seeming pushy. She was shy, the girl says, and he is put in mind of Elsie Covington, who couldn’t walk into a crowded room without suffering palpitations apparently.

‘I know, I know,’ he sympathizes. ‘It’s a horrible affliction, shyness.’

The boyfriend’s mother hadn’t been agreeable to handing over the address, and seemingly there was no one else who might have known it. All of it is worse, the Irish girl insists, because she knows that if she’d pressed for it he’d have given it to her immediately, no doubt about that.

Pull the other one, is Mr Hilditch’s silent response before he turns the ignition on and drives slowly from the car park. He knows where the local hospital is: he went there once on the off chance that one of the night nurses might be tired enough to accept a lift. Walked off their feet, some of them, and the next thing is they could be giving the whole thing up, in need of help and advice from an older man. When the car is parked he says:

‘I’ll just pop in, dear, find out the state of play.’

The girl blows her nose in a tissue that looks to Mr Hilditch as if it has been used before. Young Sharon had a dreadful habit of
keeping used tissues on her person, and cotton wool she dabbed her make-up with, and half-smoked cigarettes.

‘I’ll make off now,’ the girl says. The rims of her eyes are almost scarlet. Tears come again. ‘I’m OK,’ she says.

‘You be a good girl and hold on, Felicia. I’ll be gone five minutes, just get a report on her. Then we’ll maybe have a cup of tea and see what’s what.’

When her teeth show they glisten, due to a coating of saliva. Gaye had a gap between her two front teeth where saliva used to gather, but of course you can’t have everything.

‘I don’t want to be a nuisance to you.’

‘You’re never a nuisance, Felicia. You’d never be that.’

In the hospital reception area he asks where the lavatory for visitors is, and follows the direction he’s given. He finds a telephone and rings the catering department to say he has been delayed that morning as a result of having to assist a neighbour who suffered a stroke in the night. Slowly he returns to the car park.

She will have to walk back to that factory to make certain. She should have made further inquiries, not just asked the security man. She shouldn’t have got into the car again; she should have said she’d like to be on her own, so that she could think about what to do next. But the disappointments that have accumulated, and the addition of this latest one, form a necklace of despair that shackles her will. Wearily she reflects that the man has been good to her: the least she can do is to accept his concern, and what use is there, anyway, in her searching? What point is there in endlessly asking and endlessly being told that people can’t help her, in tramping about, looking at the faces on the streets?

She hears, again, the outraged protest of her great-grandmother when she burrowed beneath the old woman’s rubber sheet, extracting the clothes-peg bag and then returning it. ‘Get off out of that!’ came the cry from the depths of sleep, muzzy and confused. By now, they’d have been told at Doheny’s that she took the Dublin bus; by now Mrs Lysaght would have passed it around that while she was out at early Mass a week ago someone climbed in through her kitchen window, leaving mud on the sill and the spotless surface of
her sink.
Went to an airshow Sunday
, a postcard with barges on it had said, his handwriting tidily sloping, loops and dots and crossed t’s. On the lined exercise paper of his brief letters there was never an address at the top. Father Kilgallen will summon her if she goes back now, the Reverend Mother too, both of them intent on preserving the life of the child that is her shame. ‘God damn you to hell!’ her father’s greeting awaits her.

The car lurches on its springs as the fat man re-enters it. His breath is noisy in the small space.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers, hoarse from his exertions.

When Felicia turns to look at him his pinprick eyes are staring vacantly. He makes no attempt to start the car. She watches him trying to steady the quivering in the hand that is closer to her, pressing it against the steering wheel.

‘Is something wrong?’ she asks, her attention wrenched away from her distress. ‘What’s happened?’

‘A cup of something,’ he mutters, reaching into a pocket for his car keys. ‘We’re both in need of a hot beverage.’

9

Buddy’s the cafe is called.

An electrician is on a step-ladder, working at a fuse-box just below the ceiling. The ceiling is brown, stained with pools of a deeper brown. Behind the bar where the tea and coffee and food come from there is a row of Pirelli calendars, half-dressed models in provocative poses. An old man is smoking and reading the sports news in the
Sun
at a table in a corner.

‘I think a coffee,’ Mr Hilditch requests. ‘Would you mind fetching me over a coffee, dear?’

He closes his eyes and keeps them closed until she returns.

‘Is something wrong?’ he hears her ask again.

‘Ada’s not so hot,’ he whispers, with his eyes still closed. ‘They did an emergency on her, five this morning. She’s not so good.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’ The first time he took Beth to the A361 Happy Eater he observed the woman at the till deciding that Beth was his daughter, and he laid his hand for a moment on Beth’s knee the way a father never would. He glanced in the direction of the till and the excitement began because the woman was still staring, deciding now that the relationship was different.

‘I’m sorry,’ this present girl is repeating, and Mr Hilditch opens his eyes.

‘You get a shock like this you don’t want to be alone. Both of us with a shock, Felicia.’

Her red coat, unbuttoned in the cafe, has fallen back, and for the first time he sees the other clothes she is wearing: a navy-blue skirt and a red knitted jumper. Her hair has gone lank, the rims of her eyes have recovered a bit. She still wears the little cross on a
chain around her neck: a Catholic girl, Mr Hilditch speculates, which stands to reason, coming from where she does.

‘You’re pregnant,’ he says softly.

‘Yes.’

They sit in silence. In many ways, he considers, there is nothing as tasty as a toasted bacon sandwich. Sometimes you find a café like this won’t do you one, but this morning they’ve struck lucky.
Bacon sandwich’s
, a handwritten sign advertises.

‘I think you should have something to eat, Felicia.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

A mouthful or two is a comfort in distress, he quietly explains, better for you than a coffee on its own. They sit in silence again. He finishes the coffee she bought and rises to get them some more.

‘Mine was tea,’ she says.

‘Not a coffee, dear?’

‘Coffee doesn’t agree with me at the moment.’

‘Ah yes, of course.’ He pushes himself to his feet and goes to the counter. ‘Two bacon sandwiches,’ he orders from a small Indian woman, no taller than a dwarf, he considers. ‘A tea for my girlfriend and a coffee for myself.’ He smiles at the woman, knowing that the smile cannot be seen by the Irish girl. ‘Look lovely, those bacon sandwiches you do.’

The woman doesn’t acknowledge that. Often they don’t. He counts out one pound fifty-four, recalling an occasion when he was seated beside an Indian woman in a cinema and tried to strike up a conversation but she rudely moved away. Younger than the one serving him, she’d been on her own or else he’d never have presumed. ‘Sugar for the tea?’ he inquires. ‘My girlfriend likes a spoon of sugar.’

A sachet of sugar is thrown on to the counter and then, at last, there is a flicker of interest. Still not responding to his smile, the Indian woman notices the girl in the red jumper and for a passing instant – he’s certain of it – considers their relationship. He nods, confirming what he believes the woman’s speculation to be. They’re having a day out, he confides, his fiancée and himself.

‘You’ll find your friend,’ he says when he returns to the table. ‘If we failed at the factory, Ada said to me last night, we’ll find him where his abode is.’

‘I thought I might run into him on the street. I didn’t realize the town would be so big.’

‘Of course you didn’t. It’s understandable, that.’

‘The town I come from myself –’

‘It would be smaller, of course it would.’ Mr Hilditch inclines his head understandingly. Naturally it wouldn’t be the size of an English town, he agrees, you wouldn’t expect that. He wonders if the girl is religious since she’s a Catholic. It would account for a lot if she turned out to be religious, like Jakki was. She says again she’s sorry about his wife.

‘You don’t mind keeping me company for just a few more minutes? Only she’s dozy at the moment and they said best I should go. I told them I had a friend in the car and they said I’d be better off in the company of a friend.’ Mr Hilditch risks the shadow of a smile. ‘To tell the truth, it lifts my mind, just sitting here with a friend.’

He lets another silence gather. He likes to look at something tasty before he takes the initial bite: he was no more than five or six when that was first noticed in him. He likes to think about it. ‘Eat up, dearie,’ his mother used to press. ‘Mustn’t be a Mr Dawdle.’

‘I have to tell you, Felicia, it isn’t a bolt out of the blue. A shock certainly, but not a bolt from the blue.’

She nods. She begins to say something. He watches her changing her mind.

‘ “I’ll maybe not come out,” she said on the way over last night. She faced it months ago. We all face it one day, Felicia.’

She nods again, at a loss for words, as any girl would be. There is a tiny dimple, almost unnoticeable, that comes and goes in one of her cheeks, affected by her change of expression.

‘I’m glad you’re going to have a baby, Felicia. It’s a help to me, that.’

‘A help?’

‘Another life coming. Ada going in at this particular time and
you being here, and Ada concerned about you when 1 told her. A young Irish girl, I said, and she asked me what you looked like.’

She doesn’t comment on that. He bites into the crisp toast of his sandwich, savouring the chewy bacon and the saltiness.

‘Don’t you want the baby, Felicia?’

‘I don’t know what to do until I find him.’

Again she struggles with tears, and then pulls herself together.

‘The father’s the young man we’re looking for, Felicia?’

‘Yes.’

‘To tell you the truth, I thought there might be something like that.’

‘I don’t want to bother you with it.’

‘Another person’s trouble can lift the mind, Felicia.’

‘Yes.’

‘You understand me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll drive you back when I’ve been to the hospital again.’

She says there is no need. She says she’ll maybe go out to the factory and make sure there hasn’t been a mistake. He shakes his head.

‘I don’t think there was a mistake, dear.’

The Indian woman is engaged in a shrill conversation on the telephone. Neither the electrician nor the old man in the corner has displayed any interest in them, but then they wouldn’t, people like that. Another thing is, the condition she is in hardly shows; you can tell all right, but it has to catch your eye. If she were bigger it might be a different kettle of fish, with the Indian woman noticing and speculating further.

‘Ada’d like to know I was still keeping an eye on you.’

‘Will you be all right yourself?’

He shakes his head. You couldn’t be all right in circumstances like these, no one could. Finishing the second bacon sandwich, he wipes his fingertips with a paper napkin.

‘What I’m thinking of is your condition, Felicia. I’m just thinking that walking about with those carriers mightn’t be a help.’

To his surprise, she appears to lose track of the conversation.

She starts on about the missing address, saying it’s all her fault. She says again she didn’t want to be pushy.

‘I know what you mean, dear. I know how you feel, I’ve had experience. Some of the young squaddies I had under me were in a shocking state due to emotional harassment. Terrible to see them – decent, innocent young fellows, bowels all to pieces.’

‘I’d have stayed at home waiting for him if it wasn’t for the baby.’

Mr Hilditch nods sympathetically. He allows a silence to gather before he says:

‘Are you thinking of having the thing terminated, Felicia? Do they have that over there?’

‘There’s difficulties.’

‘You could have it done here, of course. Any day of the week you could have the matter attended to.’ He pauses. ‘Old friend, is he? Your sweetheart?’