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.
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.
Felicia's Journey Page 16
