Felicia's Journey (14 page)

A middle-aged couple, Mr and Mrs Priscatt, wear rimless spectacles and are similar in appearance, pale-faced and brownly dressed. Mr Priscatt’s brown suit is carefully pressed, his shirt is fresh and clean, his tie has a business emblem on it. Mrs Priscatt’s cardigan is a lighter shade of brown than the jumper beneath it, perfectly matching her pleated skirt. Unlike Miss Calligary and the other women who have congregated, she wears no jewellery.

Her husband, Mrs Priscatt informs Felicia, is in the claims department of the Eagle Star insurance company and is looking forward to retirement. She herself devotes all her time to the promulgation of their discovered faith. Mr Priscatt adds that it is heartening to welcome a new face.

‘You are pregnant with a child.’ The statement is neither a question nor an accusation. It is made by Mrs Priscatt, and both she and her husband nod their confirmation of the assumption before Felicia replies.

‘Yes,’ she agrees, feeling that in spite of their confidence in this matter some comment from her is required.

‘Mrs Priscatt can always tell.’ Accompanied by a sideways inclination of the head in his wife’s direction, Mr Priscatt’s tone is complimentary.

‘A girl child,’ Mrs Priscatt predicts, and Mr Priscatt suggests that Joanna is a lovely name.

Felicia is questioned then, and she passes on details of the circumstances that have overwhelmed her. Everything she says is sympathetically received, and later, when she has talked to other people in the room, she senses that already all of them know how her troubles have come about, although only the Priscatts have questioned her on the subject. Without condemnation, the knowledge is there in their expressions. A child will be born in the Gathering House, Felicia hears Bob whispering to Ruthie, another child born, as their own two beautiful children have been. Listening, not saying much herself, Felicia feels that all of it is more like a dream than reality, she has never in her life met people like this before, nor even known that such people exist.

One by one they bid her good-night and repeat that she is
welcome. Pamphlets are left with her as reading matter, should she be wakeful. Her bed-roll arrives and thankfully she rests, her worries lost in oblivion.

11

Mr Hilditch has seen them about: nutters, is his view. He has noticed them on the streets, imposing their literature on people, bothering people with religious talk.

Somehow or other the girl has become entangled with them; certainly she’s lodging in their house because he has seen her entering it. An innocent girl from the bogs of Ireland, susceptible to any suggestion they’d make: what chance would she have under pressure like that? The only consolation is that the house she’s in is well away from the Old Hinley Road barracks, two miles at least, maybe two and a half. The lads from the barracks use the Goose and Gander, and Hinley Fish ‘n’ Chips at the Stoat roundabout, or else the Queen’s Head down Budder way. Mr Hilditch remembers that from the Elsie Covington days, when a young thug from the barracks had her out a couple of times. The area isn’t part of the town, never was. Apart from the barracks, there’s nothing much doing there: weekends or a heavy night out, the squaddies are on the motorway down to Brum.

Mr Hilditch plays ‘Falling in Love Again’ on his gramophone, then ‘Stella by Starlight’ and ‘Makin’ Whoopee’. The records are old seventy-eights: being an antique, the gramophone doesn’t play anything else. Mr Hilditch relaxes in an armchair, the
Daily Telegraph –
all of it read – on the carpet beside him, the melodies a solace in his worry about the well-being of the girl he has befriended.
‘Ev’ry rolling stone gets to feel alone,’
sings Doris Day,
‘When home sweet home is far away.’

Mr Hilditch calls this room his big front room, the expression used privately to himself because there never has been a call to use it to anyone else. The oil paintings of other people’s ancestors gaze benignly down at him. His billiard table, rarely used, is in a
corner; a cabinet contains someone else’s collection of paperweights. Two grandfather clocks, wound every Thursday evening and adjusted daily, tick agreeably, one between the heavily curtained windows, the other by the door. On the black marble mantelpiece, above a mammoth electric fire with glowing coals, there are china mugs, and ornaments: a seal balancing a ball, ballet dancers, a comic orchestra of Dalmatians, highland cattle. The room’s wallpaper is mainly crimson, roses on a trellis. Books of military history, back numbers of the
National Geographic
magazine, bound volumes of
Punch
and the
Railway and Travel Monthly
fill a bookcase.

‘Never thought my heart could be so yearny,’
sings Doris Day.
‘Why did I decide to roam?’

The song concludes and the needle whines softly as the record continues to revolve. It’s a pleasant sound, Mr Hilditch considers and listens to it lazily, much calmer now than when he entered the room an hour ago. Tomorrow he’ll try again for an encounter.

For several days Felicia lodges in the Gathering House, leaving it every morning to make inquiries, to scan the faces on the streets and to travel to factories she has heard about, in other towns. Often she is sent in error to a factory that has changed its function, and in this way she becomes familiar with plant-hire yards, and sheds where diggers and tracked excavators are repaired, and engineering works where compressors and rammers are manufactured. In her continuing search for anywhere that has to do with lawn-mowers she passes by scrapyards in which old motorcars are disembowelled before being heaped on top of one another, and timber yards and builders’ yards and brewers’ yards. When she asks, she is sometimes told – if she happens to ask an elderly person – about the great mowers of the past: the days of the Dennis, and the Ransome and the Atco in their prime. Nothing is as it was then, such informants agree, shaking their heads over her hopeless task as if it, too, is an aspect of nothing being as it was.

Every evening in the Gathering Room the other inmates ask her if she has found her friend yet and she says no. No one comments and still no one condemns. She eats with Miss Calligary, as she did the first evening, and every morning Miss Calligary makes tea for
both of them, and offers cornflakes and toast. Felicia guesses that Miss Calligary has been in touch with the Father Lord on her behalf, that Mr Hikuku has, and the woman with sweet breath, and the Priscatts, and Agnes and Bob and Ruthie, and the old Ethiopian whose face resembles a walnut. Joyful expectation greets her every evening when the people congregate, their concern for her apparent all over again, their forgiveness offered afresh: hers is the soul that has been saved on the premises; she is the sinner whose redemption is present for each and every one to witness. In the shining brightness of the Gatherers’ love an infant will be made aware of the Message and the Way, its infant’s inheritance the future of the one who dies, a girl child who shall be called Joanna.

The heady, unreal atmosphere becomes cloying in the end. Aware that her mute presence has misled the people of the Gathering House, Felicia does her best to dispel the illusion her arrival has engendered, but no one listens. And the more they do not do so the more it is borne in upon her that she is accepting their hospitality under false pretences. She is a pregnant girl who is desperately hunting for the father of her child: there’s no more to it than that.

So early one morning she goes, leaving a note on her bed-roll, thanking everyone. As she did before she was taken in at the Gathering House, she moves about then from one bed-and-breakfast place to another, changing districts in the hope of finding herself by chance in the neighbourhood of the missing address, still travelling by day to factories she has been advised about.
You have all been good to me
, the note she left behind in the Gathering House says, but when she catches a glimpse of Mr Hikuku on the street she feels guilty about leaving in the way she did. Once she catches a glimpse of the little green humpbacked car, and she feels guilty then too.

At the very last moment, when she is suddenly there one afternoon, asking directions of a couple with a guide-dog, prudence restrains Mr Hilditch from the encounter he has been anticipating with some fervour. All he has to do is to cross the street and say hullo when the couple have moved on. If he’s noticed by a local
person to whom he is known, by sight or otherwise, the chances are that not much significance will be read into it, the assumption made that further directions are being given. But the fact remains that this is still home ground and you never know. No way could they walk an inch together on the street. And what if she turned her taps on, or acted familiar? And how much of value could be exchanged in the minute or two it would be safe for him to stand there in the broad light of day, gesturing as he supplies the directions the guide-dog couple have been unable to assist her with? It is contact enough, Mr Hilditch decides during his hesitation, to know she has left the religious set-up, which he can tell she has from the fact that she’s on the streets with her carriers again. Patience will bring her back to him. Sooner or later she’ll turn to him for help, since he has offered it.

In a public lavatory, with the door locked, Felicia feels her way through the belongings in the heavier of her carrier bags, to the jersey in which she has secreted the greater part of her money. She has two pounds and seventy-three pence left in the purse in her handbag.

But the sleeves of the jersey are empty and, thinking she has made a mistake, she searches the other bag. Since it yields nothing either, she returns to the first one. In a panic she takes everything out of both, littering the floor of the cubicle, unfolding the navy-blue jersey and shaking out all the other clothes. The money is not there.

She tries to calm herself. Could the notes have somehow worked their way out of the woollen sleeves and become displaced when she took something from the bag in the room she first occupied overnight, or in the Gathering House, or in one of her other lodging places?

‘Nothing was found,’ the hatchet-faced landlady in Marshring Crescent states when she returns there. ‘What is it you’re missing?’

Felicia says it is money. She might have taken it out from where it was and put it down somewhere, although she doesn’t recall doing so.

‘No money was found.’

‘Would it be possible to look, just to make sure?’

‘The room was done out the day you left and every day since. I do the cleaning myself.’

Felicia explains that as a result of what has happened she has very little money left. All she wants to do is to make certain she didn’t leave anything behind.

‘You left nothing.’ The woman is emphatic. Felicia goes away.

She makes the rounds of the other bed-and-breakfast houses, but without success. She is not surprised because by now it has become apparent to her that the money could not have made its way unaided out of her hiding place, and in none of these rooms did she leave her bags behind by day since in each she stayed no more than a single night. Only in the Gathering House did she do that, considering the bundle of banknotes safe among religious people.

‘So you return to us, child?’ Miss Calligary greets her a little stiffly when she rings the bell, not smiling in her usual manner. ‘So you are here again.’

‘I had to go to look for my friend.’

‘And now the friend has said to you, “I cannot assist”. Is it a friend who will say that to a girl heavy with child?’

‘He doesn’t know.’

‘Child, they always know.’

Not invited into the Gathering House, and sensing no sympathy whatsoever from Miss Calligary, Felicia suddenly feels tired. The loss of her money is a disaster almost as great as her failure to locate the right factory. The money isn’t even her own; if she wanted to turn round now and go home she wouldn’t be able to; she hasn’t enough left for a single night’s lodging.

‘I lost some money while I was here.’

‘Money?’

‘I had money in one of my bags.’

‘What you saying to me, child?’

‘I had money that was with my clothes. I had it hidden away and it’s been taken.’

‘Not in this house. Never that, child.’

‘It’s missing.’

‘Stolen? You saying stolen?’

‘Ah no, I’m not at all. Only I left it here during the daytime, I don’t know what I was thinking about. If we could just look –’

‘You go away without a word, child. You come back here with this talk.’

‘I have hardly any money now.’

‘You are asking me for money, child?’

‘Maybe I took it out here by mistake. Maybe it slipped out. If we could look in the room.’

Not deigning to reply, Miss Calligary opens the door a little wider and then leads the way to the empty Gathering Room. But there is nowhere there where the money could be, no drawers to pull out, no carpet on the parquet floor, and only the radiators behind which Felicia hopelessly looks.

‘You leave us, child. You turn your back on our people and our true belief and now there is accusations.’

Tears run over Felicia’s cheeks as she shakes her head, denying that she has turned her back. Everyone was kind to her, she says; everyone was sympathetic; she was ashamed that she moved on so hurriedly. It was all her fault; she should have looked every day to see that the money was still there. She should have divided it more evenly, half in the jersey, half in her handbag. In an effort to control her sobs, she clenches her fingers into her palms until it hurts.