Felicia's Journey (22 page)

Nylon the nightdress material is, Mr Hilditch supposes. When she pushed herself up in the bed a strap of the nightdress slipped from her shoulder. The outline of two slight breasts, like little sandcastles, showed beneath the flimsy covering. Mr Hilditch doesn’t wish to dwell upon what is coming into his mind now, but the recollection of the inadequate nightdress persists. In an effort to distract himself he pours condensed milk over the pineapple cubes, but the ploy doesn’t work.

‘Going out, dear?’ his mother said, turning from the looking-glass on her dressing-table, her hair already pinned up beneath the turban she wore at night. ‘Just for a while,’ he said, and she said surprising, at this hour. He could tell she knew, something in her
eyes. He could tell she was pretending, the casual way she asked the question.

In his dining-room Mr Hilditch pours tea into a cup he bought in a junk shop in Leighton Buzzard. It is cream-coloured, with a green band on the rim, matching two others on the kitchen dresser and the one that’s upstairs now, on the tray. He stirs in sugar and adds milk, then crosses to the door and listens. He moves from the room and stands for a moment at the bottom of the stairs, listening also. There is no sound. In the dining-room he sips his tea.

‘Quick time; lover?’ the professional offered and he said yes. She tucked her arm into his as they made their way to where he had left the car. Cathy her name was and he gave his as Colin. ‘Drive out a bit,’ she instructed, mentioning the money before he turned on the ignition, stating the sum. Her face had a sick tinge in the night light, a mouthful of bad teeth, drink on her breath. She shifted in the car seat, doing something to her clothing, and it was then that he wanted to be on the street with her again, noticed by the passers-by, as they’d been a moment ago. ‘Just talk, could we?’ he mumbled. ‘Fancy a tea?’ Another quid, she said, and brought him to an all-night transport place, where the lorry drivers addressed her by name. She said she was hungry; he went to get her something, and when he returned a lorry man rose from the chair that had been his. ‘See you, duck,’ the lorry man muttered to her.

Mr Hilditch gathers up the dishes he has eaten from and carries them to the kitchen. ‘What’s with you?’ the professional asked, and he said nothing. ‘That it, is it?’ she asked. ‘That all, Colin?’ He didn’t say he hadn’t known when he approached her that that was all; he didn’t say anything, not feeling up to making a comment. ‘Any time, sunshine,’ she said.

He drops the Fray Bentos tin into his garbage bucket and washes the dishes in the sink. He rinses the teapot and puts it to drain. He scours the potato saucepan and brushes away the faint scummy ring left by the cauliflower. He places what remains of the pineapple chunks and the condensed milk in the refrigerator. The professional had something wrong with her jaw, misshapen in some way.

In his big front room he puts on ‘Besame Mucho’ and leaves the
door open so that the melody can spread through the house. In the kitchen he stacks away the saucepans and wipes the draining-boards and the stove. He hangs the cup up on the dresser and notices that there isn’t a chip on any of the three, and none that he can remember on the one that’s upstairs by the bedside. On all of them the green of the rim is worn away in places, as naturally it would be after time.

In the recruiting shed the recruiting sergeant had run a finger over his thin moustache, hiding a smirk. He hadn’t attempted to disguise the fact that he considered it amusing that a would-be recruit should suggest a quartermaster’s duties when two small disabilities, to do with sight and feet, ruled out the career that all through childhood had been taken for granted. ‘You’ll never remember me,’ he might have said in the car park, catching up with the couple.

Mr Hilditch pours milk for Ovaltine into a saucepan, enough for two cups, which they can drink together in the little bedroom now that she has calmed. He pads across the hall to change the record to ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’.

‘I’ll go in the morning.’ For the second time that day she causes him to jump. She is there at the bottom of the stairs when he emerges from the big front room, her red coat on top of her nightdress, her feet bare. She is carrying the tray, the sausages still untouched.

‘I’m heating milk for Ovaltine.’ He can think of nothing better to say, and she follows him into the kitchen, clearly more tranquil now. When he has made the drink he suggests they might like to have it in the big front room. ‘Make a change for you, eh?’

They sit on either side of the electric fire. When ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’ comes to an end he puts on ‘Charmaine’.

‘Forty-two pounds,’ she says. ‘If I could borrow that.’

‘I doubt if that’s sufficient, dear. Any little mishap, it’s terrible to be short. Well, you’ve had experience yourself of course.’

‘I’ll send every penny back. And every penny it cost today.’

‘Today was my treat, dear, I’m happy about that. Ada would have wanted today.’

The music is soft enough to permit their conversation; they
don’t have to raise their voices. She is in no fit state to travel anywhere: gently he says so.

‘You said you couldn’t face them, dear. You said it to me several times in the car. I’m nervous for you, dear.’

‘I have to go.’

‘You weren’t at all well in the car. All the way back. And in the hall. I thought I’d have to send for assistance the way you were in the hall. You can’t set out on a journey in that condition, dear.’

‘I shouldn’t have done it.’

‘What’s done’s done, dear. No one ever got rich on regrets. What about the bright side, eh? For as long as you want it, Felicia, there’s a welcome at Number Three. You have your own little room now. The sensible thing would be if we took it day by day.’

‘I had dreams. All the time it was happening I had dreams. And then again afterwards, upstairs. That I was carrying the child in my arms, that we buried it under a potato stack.’

‘Drink up your Ovaltine, dear.’

She repeats that she’ll pay back everything and he reminds her that this doesn’t matter. He paid debts for Jakki and for Beth, quite sizeable a few of them; he bought Elsie Covington a suite of furniture. All of it gave him pleasure, keeping them by him. He didn’t know at the time that the furniture was sold again immediately.

‘I have to go home now. No matter how I’m feeling I have to face them.’

Her coat has fallen back, revealing more of the blue and orange nightdress. She’s still wearing the cross around her neck.

‘I’d like you to stay on. Just for a day or two. You’re calmer, Felicia. It’s good to see that. You’ve come to terms with what was necessary.’

But she shakes her head so vehemently that he fears another outburst. She holds her tears back, twisting her fingers together, her knuckles turned white with the effort. Again she doesn’t trust herself to speak, which he’s grateful for. He lets the record come to an end before he speaks himself, quietly, not pressing the point.

‘It’s only that I’d rather see you with some nourishment in you before you set off anywhere.’

He crosses to where she’s sitting and removes the skin from the surface of her Ovaltine, returning the teaspoon to her saucer. He changes the record to ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’.

‘I’m sorry to be fatherly, Felicia. I can’t help being fatherly because I’ve grown fond of you. The first day I saw you, you were there with your bags, woebegone and bedraggled. I’d like to be sure you were on the mend, that’s all I’m saying to you.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘I have to say far from it, Felicia. I’ll be honest with you: your Johnny wouldn’t know you, the way your eyes have sunk back into your head, and the big patches of black around them, and not an ounce of flesh to spare. I couldn’t let you go like that, I couldn’t let you walk out on to the streets. God knows what would happen, Felicia. D’you understand me, dear?’

She still hasn’t touched her Ovaltine. Her bare feet are petite on the patterned carpet – her best feature, now that he notices them.

‘I want to go,’ she says, and he explains that people often want to do something that isn’t in their best interests, that often it takes someone else to see what’s what.

‘That’s all I’m saying to you, dear. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t say it.’

‘
Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer
,’ the Chattanooga Choo Choo traveller promises, ‘
than to have your ham
’
n
’
eggs in Carolina
…’

He lets a silence grow. There’s a deadness about her eyes now, all the fervour that was present earlier totally gone. She’ll sink into a corner in that household where she came from, she’ll dry up into a woman who waits for ever for a useless man. The Black and Tans should have sorted that island out, his Uncle Wilf said, only unfortunately they held back for humane reasons. Choosing his words, he puts all that to her, though not mentioning the Black and Tans in case it upsets her. When he has finished, as though she hasn’t heard a word, she says again that she must go back now, that there is nothing else, that she has no choice. Then she stands up, and like a zombie makes her way out of the room.

It wasn’t the recruiting sergeant with that woman. ‘Wishful thinking, dear,’ his mother used to say. Easy to get something
wrong when you want to, she did it on occasion herself. ‘Well, you know that, dearie,’ she reminded him, in a twinkling mood, all dressed up, the fox’s head of her fur upside down, the fragrance of her lavender water.

They were just some couple; a vague resemblance there had been and in an emotional state he had let his imagination run away with him. ‘Wishful Wally,’ she used to say, and laugh to show she was only being a tease.

The whine of the needle on the no man’s land of the record has begun. Mr Hilditch listens to it, not moving from his chair, the ornate electric fire casting pink shadows on his trousers. Of all his rooms this is his favourite, the crimson wallpaper and set against it the soft green baize of the billiard table it took four men to carry in. The sofa and the well-stuffed armchairs, the cabinet of paperweights, the mantelpiece ornaments and the portraits of other people’s ancestors, the two grandfather clocks: all are at peace with one another and have a meaning for him.

But for once the room’s tranquillity fails to influence the torrent Mr Hilditch’s emotions have become, and after some minutes he crosses to the gramophone and lifts the needle from the record. It is dangerous for the Irish girl to go. He said it and she didn’t listen; he said it clearly, he even repeated it. She’s going back to less than nothing. He doesn’t understand why she can’t see that.

Beth couldn’t see it, either, when he put it to her that it was foolish to move south. Nor could Sharon when she said she had to go; nor Bobbi come to that, nor Gaye, nor Elsie Covington, nor Jakki. Mr Hilditch closes his eyes. A confusion oppresses him, blurring what he is trying to say to himself. This present one came up to him at his place of work, he didn’t make an approach. She let him drive her all over the place, mile after mile; she permitted him to wait on her hand and foot, no better than a servant. She made no payment for petrol or oil, nor for food consumed away from the house, nor in the house itself, nor for the cost of heating and light, soap and toilet paper. Why had she sat like that? Why had she leaned forward and then leaned back again? Why had she come down in the first place, indecent in that nightdress? He knows the answer. He doesn’t want to hear it, but it’s there
anyway: she doesn’t care how she appears to him because she sees him in a certain light. She has guessed, as Beth guessed, the first of the others to do so. When Beth announced out of the blue that she was going south, everything she’d guessed was there in her eyes. It was there in all their eyes in the end. They were his friends and he was good to them. Then there was the other.

Tears flow from Mr Hilditch, becoming rivulets in the flesh of his cheeks and his chin, dripping on to his neck, damping his shirt and his waistcoat. His sobbing becomes a moaning in the room, a sound as from an animal suffering beyond endurance, distraught and piteous.

19

‘No, write it out,’ Sister Francis Xavier insists. ‘Fifty times till you know it.’

The minute the bell goes all the voices begin at once, and there’s the noise of the chairs scraping, and footsteps running, and Sister Francis saying running’s not allowed. The voices dwindle, floating back up St Joseph’s Hill, until there is silence except for the ticking of the wall clock and a door closing. The maps are still hanging on the blackboard. They should have been put away, the physical and the political they’re called: mountains and rivers, the counties all different colours. Through the window, her father is in the garden, tying up Michaelmas daisies. He doesn’t see her looking at him; he doesn’t know she has been kept in.
Is maith liom
, she writes, and then the coffin is by the dug grave. Her mother is going into that hole, but Father Kilgallen says to heaven. Peace, Father Kilgallen says, and clay makes a clatter on the yellow wood. Father Kilgallen raises his hand for the blessing, and Carmel is the bridesmaid then. ‘Who’s that?’ Johnny asks, and someone says a nightclub singer. The singer has long black hair and bangles and earrings, high heels that shine, black like her hair. She smiles when she sings, a white flash in her face, the sunshine of Spain she calls it. ‘Where’s Johnny?’ Carmel asks, and Aidan says he came into McGrattan Street Cycles and Prams to buy a pram for the baby, but when she goes there she can’t find him. She looks for him by the old gasworks, but he isn’t there either. She calls out to him because it’s dark. He doesn’t come into the fish restaurant, he isn’t in Mr Caunce’s house. ‘Johnny!’ she calls out, going up in the hotel lift with the children, and the children make a singsong of his name. ‘You’re wanted, Johnny! You’re wanted!’ Connie Jo is laughing, drinking wine with Mr Logan. Rose says it’s a queer
thing, Johnny going ahead on the honeymoon.
‘Take my hand,’
the Spanish woman sings.
‘Take my whole life too…’