If she goes back now she’ll wake up again in that bedroom. There’ll be another dawn breaking on the same despair, the weariness of getting up when the bell chimes six, another day beginning. The cramped stairs will again be cleaned on Tuesdays, the old woman’s sheets changed at the weekend. If she goes back now her father’s eyes will still accuse, her brothers will threaten revenge. There will be Connie Jo’s regret that she married into a family anticipating a shameful birth. There will be interested glances, or hard looks, on the street. God, you fool, Carmel will say, and Rose will say were you born yesterday?
Only being together, only their love, can bring redemption: she knows that perfectly. She knew it when Christmas passed and he did not return. She knew it during the snow that came in January; she knew it when the first week of February came gustily in, when she went to see his mother. ‘I’m a friend of Johnny’s, Mrs Lysaght’: standing now with her carrier bags, hopelessly looking about her, she hears the echo of her nervousness, a stutter in her voice.
Is it being so separated from its reality that lends the recollection such potency, distance sharpening the ordinary trudge of time? His mother’s stare, cold with suspicion and distrust, his mother at first saying nothing, seeming ready to close her front door on a whim. His mother asking her what she wanted, a dull inquisitiveness developing. The door held open then; the narrow passage, the way led to the kitchen. ‘Yes?’ his mother said, the white thread of the scar beneath her eye more noticeable in the better light. Bitter as a sloe, people called this woman.
The crowd is dwindling in the bus station, but Felicia still stands where she has taken up her position, by a refreshment kiosk that has closed. No buses are arriving now and only a few remain, waiting to set off. As clearly as she sees them, there are also the two figures in his mother’s kitchen; as clearly as she hears the voices and the laughter of the people passing near by, there are the voices of his mother and herself.
‘I was only wondering if you had Johnny’s address.’
‘What d’you want with Johnny?’
‘Just to write him a letter, Mrs Lysaght.’
‘My son wouldn’t want his address given out to all and sundry.’
‘It’d be all right giving it to me, Mrs Lysaght.’
‘I’ll be writing to him myself. I’ll tell him you called in.’
His mother knew who she was: she didn’t say so, but Felicia could tell. She knew her name and that her father worked in the convent garden, that his grandmother was still alive, almost a hundred years old. You could tell just by being in Mrs Lysaght’s presence that she was a woman who knew everything.
‘He wouldn’t mind you giving me the address.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I know he wouldn’t.’
‘He didn’t give it to you himself then?’
Felicia began to stammer. Mrs Lysaght sat down. A hand touched the lower part of her stomach, as if some pain had begun there.
‘I have things to do,’ she said, not rising at once but doing so a moment later before Felicia could collect herself. She moved towards the passage that led to her front door.
‘I know he wouldn’t mind,’ Felicia said again. She felt a burst of heat in her face that tingled to the roots of her hair. ‘I need the address badly.’
‘Johnny has his own friends here, Cathal Kelly, Shay Mulroone, boys like that. I don’t recall anyone like yourself mentioned.’
‘I need the address, Mrs Lysaght.’
Felicia’s predicament dawned in Mrs Lysaght’s features then. Her mouth sagged; distaste crept into the coldness in her eyes.
‘Leave my son alone.’ She spoke without emotion. ‘Leave him.’
‘All I want to do is to contact him.’
‘You’ve had contact enough with him.’
But Mrs Lysaght didn’t move out of the kitchen, as she had begun to do. She remained in the doorway and after a moment raised the fingers of her right hand to the scar on her face.
‘I’m not well,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lysaght.’
‘It’s why he comes back. Because I’m not well.’
‘I didn’t know –’
‘When the rent man comes on a Friday I can see him looking at me. I haven’t been myself since Johnny couldn’t find work here. The worst day of my life.’
Felicia shook her head, trying to find something to say but unable to do so. On the mantelpiece, pushed between an ornamental china box and the wall, she could see a bundle of letters and postcards, and guessed whom they were from. The address would be there.
‘I knew it,’ Mrs Lysaght said, ‘the first time he went out with you. “I think I’ll get a few lungfuls of air,” he said, and when he came in again he said he’d met Cathal Kelly. One time in Dublin, on his way back after being over to see me, he was seen with a girl coming out of an ice-cream parlour. That came back to me and I mentioned it. He laughed. “Mistaken identity,” he said. They’d do anything,’ Mrs Lysaght added, as though she had forgotten whom she was talking to, ‘once they have their clutches round a boy. Sweet as sugar, and then they’re working like adders.’
Her fingers ran slowly down the mark on her cheek. ‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ she said, ‘until the moment comes. “What about Johnny?” I said to his father. He stood there, just come in from the rain, the drips falling on to the floor, a foot from where you’re standing yourself. “Doesn’t Johnny mean anything?” I said, and all he did was look away from me, with the pool of water at his feet. “Listen to me,” he said, but what was there to listen to? He was off, and what’s there to listen to in that? “You’ll get money regular,” he said. That’s all he could think to say. Four years married, two miscarriages before Johnny, and then your husband’s off. “Take it,” I said to him, and I picked up the bread-knife off that table. “Do what you like with me. No better than dirt, that woman you’re going to.” I held the knife out to him, but he didn’t move. So I lifted it myself and I watched him watching me. And then the point broke the flesh and I pulled it down hard.’
Mrs Lysaght turned and left the kitchen when she’d said that, and Felicia followed her.
‘If I gave you a letter would you send it on for me, Mrs Lysaght?’
The front door was opened, and since no reply had come Felicia repeated her request. She would stamp the envelope, she promised. All that was necessary was that it should be addressed.
‘Very well,’ Mrs Lysaght agreed at last.
But when ten days, and then a fortnight, passed without a reply Felicia knew that the letter had not been sent. It had not been sent because his mother hated her. Johnny was being stolen from his mother, in the same way as a woman had stolen her husband: that was how his mother saw it. She’d have read the letter and probably burnt it.
As she moves from where she has been standing by the refreshment kiosk, Felicia wonders if his mother guesses where she is now; and, knowing, if she hates her more. She wonders if his mother mentioned the visit when she wrote to him herself, and thinks she wouldn’t have. Why should she, since it’s not in her interest, since there’s nothing to be gained? He never said his mother wasn’t well; it explained his solicitude for her.
‘I was worried about you,’ a voice says, and the bespectacled face of the fat man who helped her yesterday is there in a doorway. He speaks softly, his expression full of the concern he refers to, his sudden presence, and what he says, bewildering Felicia. During the course of the day, he goes on, he has made inquiries about Thompson Castings and learned that she has been misled. He was so upset that he asked around and in the end tracked down the only factory within a reasonable distance that filled the bill. They did a mower with a Briggs and Stratton engine there, the bodywork cast in the works, Sheffield blades, rotary or cylinder.
‘I think it’s what you’re looking for,’ he says. ‘I phoned up Ada from the office and she said to drop by the bus station in case I caught a sight of you coming back. When I told Ada last night what your
problem was she was worried to think of you wandering about.’
He is pressed back in one corner of the doorway, shop windows displaying shoes on either side of him. His voice is no more than a whisper, not like it was when she accosted him yesterday to ask if she’d come to the right place, or when he called out from his car at her. Ada is his wife, he says, a caring woman.
‘The only thing is it’s a good fifty miles away.’
She begins to shake her head, but he says there are lots living locally who make a journey like that every day. No reason why her friend wouldn’t. A girl in the office checked the whole thing out: up to sixty-odd miles people travel every day.
‘They’d go to business in a locality like the one you drew a blank in today, or this one I’m mentioning. Coming back here for nights.’
‘Yes, I understand. I worked that out.’
He is whistling beneath his breath, a soft breeze on his lips, soundless almost. It ceases when he speaks again.
‘What I wanted to tell you,’ he explains, ‘is that the wife and myself have to drive up that way in the morning. What I’m saying is you’d be welcome to a seat in bur little jalopy.’ He laughs, the excess flesh on his face and neck quivering and then settling again.
‘Oh, I don’t think I –’
‘No, of course you wouldn’t. Naturally you wouldn’t. It’s just that Ada said I should mention it. But I reminded her it’s an early start. You probably wouldn’t want an early start.’
‘Your wife –’
‘Ada’s poorly. We have to drop her into a hospital up there. Specialist stuff.’
‘If you could just give me the name of the factory,’ Felicia begins to say, but is interrupted at once by the doubt that spreads through the plump features in the shadows of the doorway.
‘It’s difficult, that. The girl wrote down the name and address on a notelet for me, but unfortunately I left it behind in the office. When the cleaners came on I was going to give them a ring and they’d read it out to me. But there’s no call for that if you’re not game for the early start.’
‘If you could just give me the name of the town –’
‘You’d be there for the duration, searching high and low.
There’s upwards of a hundred and fifty works you’d have to investigate, more like two hundred. Still, maybe I’ll run into you again one of these days and I’ll pass the info on. I have to be going now, to see how Ada passed the day.’ He eases himself out of the doorway and begins to walk away.
Quickly Felicia says:
‘Could I have the lift?’
‘It’s six-thirty sharp on account of Ada having to be in the hospital first thing. Sorry about that.’
‘Six-thirty’s all right.’
‘We’ll pick you up down Marshring. Junction of Crescent and the Avenue.’
He smiles and nods. He won’t forget to ring the cleaners, he promises, then ambles off. Felicia watches his cumbersome form disappear into the car park before taking his place in the doorway, her glance again searching the crowd for Johnny Lysaght.
7
The house is silent and in darkness. No pet is there to witness the homecoming of its single occupant, not a goldfish or a bird. A key turns in the deadlock, a second one clicks in the Yale. The spacious hall is illuminated, the breathy sound of an aborted whistle begins.
Mr Hilditch hangs his mackintosh on the hall-stand, catching a single glimpse of himself in its octagonal mirror. Mechanically, he raises a hand to pat an area of his short hair. Other families’ ancestors regard him from the portraits he has purchased over the years, a strangers’ gallery that is no longer strange. In his kitchen he gathers together the ingredients of a meal.
The frisson of excitement that has been with him all day is charged with a greater surge now that he has spoken to the Irish girl again: never before has there been a girl as close to home as this one, a girl who actually approached him on the works premises. Elsie Covington cropped up in Uttoxeter, Beth in Wolverhampton, Gaye in Market Drayton. Sharon was Wigston; Jakki, Walsall. All of them, like the Irish girl, came from further afield and were heading elsewhere, anywhere in most cases. You make the rule about not soiling your own doorstep, not shopping locally, as the saying goes; you go to lengths to keep the rule in place, but this time the thing just happened. Fruit falling from a tree you haven’t even shaken; something meant, it feels like. And perhaps to do with being approached rather than the other way round, Mr Hilditch senses a promise: this time the relationship is destined to be special.
The snapshot memories begin again: weekend appearances in towns and places where no one knows he is Hilditch, a catering manager; hours spent in the car, watching from a vantage point near a disco that is due to end, or just parked anywhere on the off chance; up and down the motorways, alert on the approach roads in case there is another vehicle to keep close to; fatherly conversations with waitresses in bed-and-breakfast places, an invitation offered but not often accepted.
Mr Hilditch wonders if the breaking of his meticulously kept rule is in some way related to the fact that the Irish girl comes from so far away, a foreigner you might say, the first time there has been that. She is the ultimate in passing trade, more than just a new face for the A522 Burger King or the Forest East Services, or the Long Eaton Little Chef. Whatever the reason for his own behaviour, he finds himself exhilarated by the circumstances that have been presented to him, and only regrets that the ordained brevity of this relationship is an element in those circumstances also. Perhaps that, he reflects as he washes a pound of brussels sprouts, is how perfection in a friendship has to be, unenduring lest it lose its quality.
Grilling the steak he bought in Tesco’s on the way back to his house, draining potatoes and the Brussels sprouts, he effortlessly keeps the girl’s features in his consciousness. He lays the table in the dining-room, carrying in salt and pepper and a few slices of Mother’s Pride on a side plate. He always eats in the dining-room in the evenings.
While waiting for the steak to grill, he scoops two individual trifles on to a plate, pours cream over them and sprinkles a spoonful of caster sugar. He carries the trifles to his long mahogany table, carrying, as well, his biscuit tin – raspberry creams and coffee creams, chocolate digestives, fig rolls, a couple of KitKats. Music plays softly: ‘Bugle Call Rag’.
She walks about, still scanning the faces on the pavements. If the man hadn’t told her what he had, if he hadn’t sounded so certain, she might by now have convinced herself that she should go home in spite of what awaits her there. Again she wonders what they’re thinking now, what conclusions have been reached. Do they dread her return as much as she dreads it herself? That thought strikes her suddenly, not having occurred to her before. Are they hoping she has gone for ever? Is there a plea in Mrs Lysaght’s prayers that she should be lost, or even dead?
‘Did you go out with young Lysaght?’ her father asked, only a few hours after she handed to Mrs Lysaght the letter in a stamped envelope. ‘A while back?’ her father went on, his tone suggesting that some further turn of the screw was in store for her. ‘October?’
A man on the street asks her something, smiling at her. She doesn’t understand; she doesn’t answer. She didn’t answer, either, when her father asked those questions. She was polishing brass at the draining-board, ornaments and ashtrays which her father liked to see gleaming, as he did the brass on people’s hall doors. ‘Around about the time of the wedding?’ he pressed.
‘I know Johnny Lysaght,’ she said. She bent her head over a piece that represented three monkeys, their paws obscuring mouth, ears or eyes. The television, which was on earlier, had been turned off.
‘Did you go out with him, though?’
‘I did.’
‘I would avoid that fellow,’ her father said. ‘I would go out with some other young fellow.’
‘What d’ you mean?’
‘You hear certain remarks made about Lysaght.’ Her father’s grey head was poked out in Fel
icia’s direction, a habit he had when he was serious or intent upon being understood. ‘I’m not saying it’s gospel. All I’m saying is there are certain statements made.’
‘What statements?’
‘That he joined the British army.’
‘Johnny works in a factory stores. Lawn-mower parts.’
He nodded thoughtfully and slowly, as if agreeing. He was frowning a little, which he tended to when endeavouring to establish an accuracy. He liked to get things right.
‘It’d be a natural enough thing for him to keep it quiet about the army.’
‘He has work in a stores.’
Her father continued to nod in the same slow fashion, and when he spoke the pace of his speech was unhurried also. He wondered, he remarked, where something without foundation would have come from, and added:
‘There’s better boys round here than that, girl. Irish boys belong in Ireland.’
‘Johnny went to England because he couldn’t get work here.’
‘A member of the British forces could be sent into the North. He could be set to killing our own.’
‘Johnny’s not in any army. It’s someone else you heard about.’
‘There’s plenty of decent Irish boys you could go to Sheehy’s public house with, girl. That’s all I’m saying to you.’
There was a silence in the kitchen then. Her father sat straight and upright in his chair, not doing anything with his hands, gazing in front of him at nothing. Felicia picked up another piece of brass.
Felicia's Journey Page 6
