Felicia's Journey (21 page)

The watch always dangles into his top pocket, only it wasn’t there when he looked. He took it off to keep it by him, so that he’d know the time when his jacket was off. He drooped the watch-chain over a fallen branch and then walked away without it. ‘We’ll go and look,’ he said in the kitchen. Her mother was there too. A Sunday because they’d all been to Mass.

It’s too hot where she is so he says go under the tree. His grandfather’s the watch was, brought back from Dublin the time his grandfather was killed by the soldiers. ‘It won’t take long,’ someone else says. ‘Try and relax now.’ It’s when he worked for the Mandevilles, before he worked for the nuns. ‘There it is,’ he says. ‘Right as rain.’

There is music a long way off, a man singing and the music. ‘That’s Felicia, ma’am,’ her father says, and a tall woman bends down and holds her hand out. ‘Shake hands with Mrs Mandeville, Felicia.’ But she doesn’t want to, and the woman laughs. She has smooth hair drawn back from her face, and trousers. ‘Felicia’s a nice name,’ she says.

A white dog sniffs her foot and she cries. The tall woman puts a finger into the dog’s mouth to show it won’t bite.

The music is still playing, and the voice is singing. ‘Look, Felicia,’ her father says, and she sees people sitting on chairs in front of a house, a man and another woman and a boy. The music
is coming from there. ‘John Count,’ her father says.

The house is green, a big square house. The bottom of a curtain has blown out of an open window and trails on the windowsill, white net on green. The hall door is open as wide as it will go, darkness inside. Tall Mrs Mandeville walks with the dog behind her, going slowly towards the chairs, her footsteps sounding on the gravel, silent on the grass. There is a rattle of plates and cups when the music ceases.

In a shed in the garden her father shows her the garden tools he uses. He tells her what each is called: rake, fork, shears, spade, hoe. This is where he spends his days. He shows her a bird’s nest in the roof of the shed, and lifts her up to see speckled green eggs. ‘Isn’t that a queer thing?’ he says.

They pick bluebells to bring back. She can hear the music again, but it’s different now. Jazz, her father says, the music of the southern American negro. ‘A black man that is, Felicia. Black all over.’

It’s hot when they come out of the wood where the bluebells are, she can feel it on her head. Her father takes one hand and she holds the bluebells in the other. The hinge on the watch is faulty, he says, he must get it fixed in MacSweeney’s. ‘Aren’t you the big girl now,’ he says, ‘able to be a companion on a Sunday?’

On the road they stop while he opens a packet of cigarettes. Sweet Afton he likes, but sometimes he’ll try another brand. He doesn’t smoke much, just now and then during the day. ‘Keep the midges off us,’ he says, lighting a match.

He tells her about when he was small, as small as she is, and about how his own father had bare feet going to school. His own father and his mother are dead, but he still has his grandmother. They go into Lafferty’s shop and he has some of her lemonade because he is thirsty, too. He carries her on his shoulders and she can smell the tang of tobacco on him. ‘All done,’ someone says and it isn’t him, and there are lights and a smell that isn’t cigarettes, clean like Jeyes’ Fluid or the stuff when the sink’s blocked. The sheets are cool, a soreness is just beginning. ‘All done,’ someone says again; the fingers on her wrist have black hairs on them. ‘She can take herself off now,’ another voice says.

17

She’s there in the waiting-room, standing in front of him, white as a sheet. The youth who saved up to go to Torremolinos doesn’t pay any attention. There’s no one else in the waiting-room now except the receptionist behind her glass window.

‘Sit down a minute, dear,’ he says, and as he approaches the receptionist’s window it is drawn back. He pays in cash. ‘Thank you,’ he says to the woman. ‘We’re greatly obliged.’

‘See she keeps warm.’

‘We have a little journey and then I’ll tuck her up.’

The woman nods, glancing at him once. He can feel her wanting to ask if he’s the father, even though she must have clearly heard it when he said girlfriend. He says the word again, mumbling through the rest of the sentence because in the time he can’t think of anything coherent to say. He smiles at the receptionist. It could happen to a bishop, he wants to say, that expression of his Uncle Wilf’s. But already the glass has slid back into place.

It’s sunny, crossing the street to the little green car. ‘You rest yourself now,’ he says, settling her in the back, and she closes her eyes, trying not to think about it. The most terrible sin of all, her mother would have said, God’s gift thrown back at Him.

‘OK?’ he asks and she says yes, but in all sorts of ways she doesn’t feel OK. She wants to ask him to lend her the money now. She wants to ask him to drop her off at a railway station, even though her belongings are still in his house. It doesn’t matter about her belongings; all that matters is going home.

But when she tries to find the words to put to him she can’t.

Burger with egg, he orders, and a portion of chips. He feels tired:
the experience has left him drained. ‘Thanks,’ he says when he receives his change at the pay-out, picking up his tray again and looking round for an unoccupied table.

It is while doing so that he notices the man and woman sitting in the corner window. There’s something familiar about the man, something about the sharpness of his face and the grey frill of his moustache. That moustache used to be jet-black, Mr Hilditch comments to himself, still not recognizing the man.

He is sitting like a ramrod and the woman is bent, suggesting arthritis. Again, there’s something familiar about the cocky way the man holds his head, and it dawns on Mr Hilditch then that this is almost certainly the recruiting sergeant who deprived him, thirty-six years ago, of his chosen way of life. The food in front of him cools, remaining untouched while he continues to observe the couple.

When they rise he rises also, and follows them to the car park. But they walk in the opposite direction from where the Irish girl is waiting, and his hope of being able to get her out of the car – to let the couple see her hanging on to his arm – is dashed. He returns to the table he has been sitting at, but the contents of his tray have been cleared away, even though anyone could have guessed he was returning. He orders another burger and chips to take away.

There’s a picture of something, a kind of bird.
Welcome Break
is on the container from which steam rises, a smell of meat. ‘Fancy a Bakewell brought out?’ he says when he has finished.

Her shoulders are too wide for the seat; her feet have to be on the floor because there isn’t room for them anywhere else. When she closes her eyes again Effie Holahan is swinging her legs on the play-yard wall. The wall is rounded at the top, newly cemented because the stones were always falling out, nice to sit on now, nice for Effie Holahan and Carmel and Rose and Connie Jo, and another girl. ‘We’re on the off,’ he says when he returns from depositing the empty carton in a bin.

The engine starts up. There’s sun on the rug, a bright patch on the tartan. ‘You’re feeling good, eh?’ he says. ‘All the old troubles over.’

She dozes, and then her own voice rouses her, crying out that she shouldn’t have done it.

In the driving-mirror he catches a glimpse of her: peaky, hair requiring attention, her round white face.

‘God forgive me,’ she whispers, quieter now, after her noisy outburst caused him to jump.

‘Fancy a fruit jelly?’ he offers, passing the bag over his shoulder, wondering if that man had really been the recruiting sergeant or if he’d suffered a delusion, the way anyone might after an emotional experience.

She doesn’t take a fruit jelly, but says again that she shouldn’t have done it.

‘I’ll make you a Bovril, dear, when we get home.’

She is warm beneath the bedclothes, safe in the bed with the wide mahogany bedstead and carved headboard that almost fills the room, one of its sides pressed against pink flowered wallpaper. A single window is a yard from its foot, and there’s a mat to step out on to, the only covering on the stained floorboards. There are plain blue curtains, which she has never drawn back, through which light filters in the daytime. Three heavily framed pictures are murky on the other walls, scenes of military action. The room contains neither a wardrobe nor a chest of drawers.

She is aware of the pain that lingers, worse than it was, and the bleeding that lingers also, and of tiredness. Again her eyelids droop and she drifts away, her body seeming strangely elongated as she lies there, her feet so far away they might not be there at all, a numbness somewhere else. On the Creagh road a car going by sounds its horn; Johnny waves because it’s someone he knows, and then they turn off into the Mandeville woods. People are made for one another, he murmurs, his lips kissing her hair and her neck. His grey-green eyes are lit up because they’re together again, because all the looking for him is over. ‘Will I put the potato stack on the top of it?’ Miss Furey’s brother asks, and points at the hole he has dug in the corner of the field, beyond the yard. ‘Would we do it at night?’ he asks. ‘Only someone might come into the yard.
If it was daytime we’d have to think of that.’ The corpse is under the hay in the barn. She carries it to the field, following him in the darkness and laying it down in the pit, the small amount of skin and blood that remains already disintegrating. ‘It’s the only way,’ someone says, and clay is shovelled in, the sods put back.

She begs for forgiveness, clutching at the robes of the Virgin. But the eyes of the Virgin are blind, without whites or pupils, and then the statue falls down from the dresser and is gone for ever also. ‘Oh, aren’t you terrible, Felicia!’ The Reverend Mother is cross, sweeping the pieces into a dustpan. And her own mother is shelling peas in the doorway, the door open to the yard, and tears fall on to the peas in the colander. ‘Supposing I’d done that to you, Felicia,’ is what her mother tries to say, speaking made difficult because of her sobbing. But Felicia knows anyway. She knows what the words are even though they aren’t spoken.

18

No orders to attack the enemy were, however, given to the flotillas, and they therefore steamed passively along their course without instructions or information. Jellicoe’s signal to his flotillas was picked up by the German listening station at Neumünster, which reported to Scheer at 10.50 p.m. ‘Destroyers have taken up a position five sea miles astern of enemy’s main fleet
.’

Abstractedly dwelling upon these facts, with the volume that contains them propped up in front of him, Mr Hilditch eats alone in his dining-room: a Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney pie with all the trimmings, a couple of slices of Mother’s Pride, pineapple chunks, condensed milk heated up, tea. His attention wanders from the sentences he peruses: the face of the youth in the waiting-room, and the faces of the staid receptionist and of the specialists and the aluminium-haired girl, crowd out the words. He sees, as clearly, the people in several Happy Eaters, in Little Chefs and Restful Trays, in the Dog and Grape and the other roadside public houses, the Blue Light fish bar, and Buddy’s Café. It is as it always is when an end has come: remembering is the best part in a way. He loads his fork with kidney, potato, and cauliflower in a white sauce. A couple of passers-by noticed them on the street, walking across the pavement to the car, passers-by who would naturally know what business was conducted at the Gishford.

Thus the German Admiral, if the Neumünster message reached him, had from this time forward a fairly clear idea of the relative positions of the two fleets
…

Again Mr Hilditch’s concentration falters. When the second outburst occurred there’d been a wildness in the eyes that were reflected in the driving-mirror, and her fingers were groping at her forehead in agitation. At the time he’d again been endeavouring to
establish if it had really been the recruiting sergeant, reflecting on the irony of the man being in the company of a bent-up elderly woman, while only yards away his own companion was a spry young Irish girl, the point he’d wanted to make to them in the car park.

At about 10.30 p.m. the 4th German Scouting Group came in contact with the British 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron which was following our battlefleet. There was a violent explosion of firing
…

Once more the words are obscured by the remembered image in the driving-mirror. She took no notice when he pointed out that sitting up wasn’t good for her. She began about a living soul destroyed, then something to do with a slop bucket. He had to turn off at the Rywell Services, thinking it would be easier to reason with her if the car was stationary. By the time he’d parked and managed to get a look at her, the tears were flowing like a fountain, hysterical you’d have to call it. He got out and left her for a while, considering it better to let her get it out of her system on her own, but as soon as he returned to the car with some nourishment she started up again immediately.

Mr Hilditch reaches out and closes the volume, then pushes it aside. There’s a pattern of faded orange flowers on her pale-blue nightdress, the material so flimsy you could hardly call it decent, her flesh showing through in places, white as her face. She shook her head over the sausages and bread he brought her an hour ago. But at least she is quieter now, sleep being a healer.