Felicia's Journey (26 page)

‘Irrational, certainly,’ Mr Priscatt agrees when she tells him, and Mrs Priscatt recalls a couple who behaved queerly in the early days of her gathering, inviting her and her husband on to their premises and then playing jokes on them: mechanical spiders crawled up Mrs Priscatt’s legs; every time she and Mr Priscatt moved on their chairs an unpleasant sound erupted; and the bottoms fell out of the cups they were given tea in, drenching their clothes with warm liquid.

‘No, it is not like that,’ Miss Calligary explains.

The edginess of the occupant of 3 Duke of Wellington Road is
retailed among the other Gatherers also, Miss Calligary still seeking advice. The old Ethiopian hears about it, as Bob and Ruthie do, and Mr Hikuku, and all the others. And when it reaches Agnes she recalls that it was she to whom the Irish girl first spoke of this man, and mentioned Duke of Wellington Road.

Responsible for the Irish girl’s presence in the Gathering House, Miss Calligary does not shirk blaming herself, and there is certainty in her tone when she offers her final opinion. ‘That girl brought pain to the Gathering House, and what I am thinking now is she brought pain to this man also, for at the mention of her he turns his back.’

This could be so, Mr Priscatt agrees, and the old Ethiopian, who has seen a thing or two on the streets and on the doorsteps, sagely nods his head. Bob and Ruthie murmur together, saying to one another that all this makes them sad.

‘He has been diddled and is distrustful,’ Miss Calligary states. ‘He is jumpy to an extent.’

The others do not argue with this. Since they have been offended themselves by the pregnant girl they gave shelter to, it seems likely that a good-hearted man would suffer also.

‘We have a duty in this matter.’ Confident that guidance has been offered, Miss Calligary is more cheerful.

22

He recognizes him at once: the tidy dark hair, the greenish eyes, the high cheekbones. Other features have not been included in the description Mr Hilditch has heard so often: a shiftiness in those eyes, a knowing smile that slants the mouth, a freshly grown moustache.

Mr Hilditch waits until he is certain – until he hears the youth’s name used – before drawing back into the shadows of the corner he has chosen to occupy in the Goose and Gander. This is the first public house near the Old Hinley barracks he has tried, twenty minutes from Duke of Wellington Road. He was in his corner only long enough to sip half of the glass of mineral water he ordered before the five soldiers noisily arrived. Although they’re not in uniform, you can tell they’re soldiers from their haircuts and their gait.

Fragments of their talk flutter across the bar to where he sits: it appears to be about motor-racing, a loose wheel spinning off into the crowd. ‘Bloody killed a bloke,’ one of the soldiers says.

Mr Hilditch doesn’t know why he has come here. Some compulsion has drawn him to the place, and further presses him to eavesdrop on this conversation. As he listens to subsequent exchanges about car-racing tracks, he does not remember what his thoughts were before he left his house, and senses that there were no thoughts: he simply drove off, knowing where he was going.

‘Your bloody round, mate,’ one of the soldiers roughly reminds another, and there’s a general noise of agreement. Glasses are drained. As an encouragement to the soldier whose round it is, the surface of the table is repeatedly struck.

Extraordinary to think of what she went through, deceived by this lout who cleared off without leaving her any means of contacting
him, cunningly aware that he would be protected by an embittered mother. Mr Hilditch remembers the tears that so often flowed when they sat together watching the door of some café, the distress there was when another blank was drawn at a factory, the guilt induced by the aborting of the unborn child. A Wednesday it was when she appeared on the forecourt. Without making an effort, he has always been able to establish the day of the week on which events occur: a Friday when the recruiting sergeant said he’d better try something else; a Monday when he got the transfers and stencil set for his birthday – the smell of washing, the small red candles, Uncle Wilf there specially. It was a Saturday, always, when they went by train down to the Spa.

‘Bloody poofter,’ one of the soldiers says. ‘Corner of Brunswick Way every evening on the dot. Forty quid he’s offering.’

‘Bloody never,’ is a disdainful comment, and: ‘Pull the one that chimes, boy.’

‘Pull bloody nothing. Fancies a uniform, that poofter does.’

Mr Hilditch doesn’t know why he can’t see her as he still sees all the others, and can offer himself only the explanation that it is because she went from him in some different way, which is the feeling he has had since the black woman stirred everything up by mentioning her. His presence here has to do with how they parted: he recognizes that now, he knows it. He is here because there’s no place for her in his Memory Lane, because any moment she may walk in. He leans back in the shadows, the conversation of the soldiers lost to him. With his single glass of mineral water he remains in this corner until the landlord calls last orders and then inquires if his customers have a home to go to. The glasses are collected by a barmaid whom the five soldiers flatter with attentions before rowdily making off.

Outside, Mr Hilditch watches them from his car and then drives about the streets, searching as desperately as his quarry once searched herself.

One day, a Thursday, a week after his visit to the Goose and Gander, Mr Hilditch does not go to work. He walks to the
telephone-box at the end of Duke of Wellington Road and puts a call in to the kitchens, stating that he is unwell. He returns to his house and sits all day, not eating, listening to a selection of his records in his big front room. When one comes to an end he does not immediately rise to place another on the turntable, but listens for a while to the whine of the needle. After that Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Alma Cogan, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, Eve Boswell, Doris Day and Howard Keel congregate to fill his day, a background to the worries that have multiplied and persist. When darkness falls he does not move from the room. The
Daily Telegraph
remains unread in the hall, where he placed it on the hall-stand on his way out to telephone the kitchens.

At nine o’clock he makes a pot of tea, and toasts a single slice of bread.

There is no reply when Miss Calligary rings the bell. This surprises her because the little green car is parked on the gravel in front of the house.

‘No, we wait a little, child.’ She restrains the presumption of her companion, who has already begun to move on. The occupant of this house is maybe out for a stroll, or gone down on foot to the off-licence. Miss Calligary rings the bell again in case the summons, hasn’t been heard.

‘Hullo, hullo,’ she calls through the letter-box.

Three further weeks pass. The days lengthen. Were Mr Hilditch to visit the same stately home again he would find daffodils in bloom on the hillside above the car park where earlier there were crocuses, and green shoots everywhere in the gardens.

But Mr Hilditch does not do so. He has not returned to his catering department since the day he telephoned with an excuse; he has only once been shopping, and then half-heartedly.
I am undergoing treatment for boils
, he has written in a letter of apology to his superiors, adding that this is treatment that necessitates a strict regime of rest and diet. Since he has never before, in all his years of employment, been absent through illness, a lenient view is taken,
and there are get-well cards from the canteen staff and the kitchen staff.

At night he continues to sleep poorly. He has lost some weight; there is a haggard look about his features now, the surplus flesh loose and drooping. If she meets up with the black woman again, God knows what she’ll come out with. God knows how it’ll be spread around then, how many people will know she was in his house. Already it could be known to the kitchen staff and the canteen workers, to all kinds of people, everywhere. Any day now the tea woman could be embarrassed to pour out his tea.

One morning, having fallen into an exhausted doze soon after dawn, he awakes with the eccentric notion that the Irish girl has invaded him, as territory is invaded. There is a faint impression – so fleeting it’s hardly there – that on some forgotten occasion the gravel in front of his house was brightly lit from the hall, that in his car he had to turn his head away from the glare.

I regret to say the treatment is taking time
, he writes to his superiors a few days later, having again scoured the streets late the night before.
This is unfortunate and unforeseen, but I trust it won’t be much longer now
. First ascertaining that the black woman is nowhere in sight, he hurries to the pillar-box at the end of Duke of Wellington Road to post this letter, the first time he has been out of his house in the daytime for a fortnight.

‘Hullo, hullo,’ Miss Calligary calls through the letter-box.

The car is still there, exactly as it was. The curtained windows of the house seem the same also.

‘Hullo, hullo,’ Miss Calligary loudly repeats.

Still there is no response.

He roams the streets on foot in case his car is recognized by an employee, doing so at an hour when he trusts he won’t be recognized himself. He goes to places he hasn’t visited for years, to the neighbourhoods the Indians or Pakistanis have taken over. The Boroda Express offers the variety stars of India: Bhangra Garta, Miss Bhavana, Deepa the Voice of Lata. The Koh-I-Noor Restaurant is under new management. The Wool Shop he
remembers, stockists of Sirdar Wools and Bairnswear, is the Rupali Boutique now.

He hurries by where shops and cafes have been abandoned and are empty of furniture and fittings, with only a scattering of junk mail left where it has fallen, beneath the low-slung letter-boxes of business premises. He walks through the Foundries, which was a thriving area in his childhood, the only reminder now of its one-time prosperity being the black brick and stone of its purposeless yards and gaunt facades. He walks through suburbs, already leafy, cars parked in car ports, houses sleeping, their windows dark. He passes close to the leisure centre he considers unnecessary, and the cream-tiled Bingo hall that was once an ABC cinema. Without noticing them, he passes churches and a synagogue and a mosque, and one of the two schools he attended, and the old town hospital, Victorian and grand, given over to offices now. In the early morning he watches the Salvation Army hostel from across the road, observing each face as the night’s lodgers emerge.

It is after one of these outings, as he is wearily making his way back to Duke of Wellington Road, that Mr Hilditch finally concludes the girl he has been seeking must have moved on. He nods to himself, cosseting the thought, eager to accept whatever comfort he can pluck out of his gloom. The girl is again in her home town, the back of beyond by the sound of it. Only there will people know, and what interest would they have in a person who is strange to them, several hundred miles away?

In his kitchen that morning he opens a tin of beans and has them with bacon and fresh bread, the
Daily Telegraph
spread out in front of him while he eats. His euphoria is modest, no more than a change from what there’s been, but he is determined to hold on to it, convincing himself that if the girl were still in the neighbourhood it would surely have dawned on her by now that her father was right about Lysaght being a soldier. She would have found her way to him, which clearly she hasn’t. And if it hadn’t dawned on her, she’d be visible on the streets. Which means that, strictly speaking, the only continuing concern is about what she passed on when she was in the God-botherers’ house.

Mr Hilditch carefully goes over the ground: she stayed in the
God-botherers’ house at a time when all there’d been between them was the lift he’d given her the morning they made the journey to that factory and the hospital. Nothing much was said then. And the state of play was similar when she associated with the two derelicts she’d mentioned; not that there is any reason to suppose she’d given the address of Number Three to those people, or said what he looked like. What it amounts to is that less damage has possibly been done than he has persuaded himself to believe.

Washing the dishes he has eaten from, Mr Hilditch considers that he is owed some luck, having lately been deprived of it, and feels that it may have come at last. But as the day advances he loses heart again, and when two or three further days have passed he finds himself back in the slough of uncertainty that has claimed him for so long now. His appetite is not sustained; increasingly, his single desire is to keep himself entirely to his house.

One evening when the bell rings he rises from his armchair after a moment’s hesitation to lift the needle off a record. The only way to set himself at rest is to know what was said. Impelled by the confusions that torment him – the hope that is there one minute and isn’t the next, the reaching out from his despondency in search of some crumb of consolation — he slowly crosses his hall. Releasing one lock and then the other, he tells himself that inquiries can be made without giving anything away. No need for many words on his part. Let the black woman talk, let her trip herself up. Ask a casual question when the moment is ripe.

‘Sir, you have been in our hearts these many weeks,’ the woman at once, and gravely, asserts when he opens his front door, and he sees reflected in her features the thought that here is a man who is greatly changed, whose clothes are not as they have been before. He observes it registering with her that the collar of his shirt does not seem clean, that the dressing-gown he is wearing at seven o’clock in the evening is ragged in places, that at this hour also he is unshaven. The expression of the girl accompanying her, the same girl as on the two previous occasions, remains blank.