Felicia's Journey

by William Trevor

  ‘It was always his ambition,’ she is saying now, ‘to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.’

  ‘This is your husband, is it?’

  ‘His great ambition and of course she played on it. Brazen in that respect. Read up on the subject – the names of the hanging plants or whatever it is they have.’

  He nods understandingly.

  ‘I have to employ a lot for the kitchens. Any forward type of woman wouldn’t stand a chance. It’s one of the little rules I have.’

  ‘The last words she spoke. “I’ll have him now,” she said. Brazen to the end.’

  Soon after this the woman announces that she has to be getting on and, since the encounter cannot be further prolonged, Mr Hilditch smiles agreeably and says their meeting has been a pleasure. He remains at the table, buttering the last scone when the woman has passed out of sight. Almost immediately, the annoyance that her company has kept at bay returns.

  It accompanies Mr Hilditch as this day wears on, and the appetite that came back so briefly does not do so again. He distracts himself as best he can: it isn’t difficult to believe that some enterprising businessman once upon a time created a myth about a local water source, deluding the afflicted for generations. He thinks about that for a while, then slips into his private past. ‘That’s a public toilet,’ his mother pointed out the first time they came here, indicating a brick building near the railings of a park. ‘Remember where it is, dearie.’ She had a cameo brooch pinned to her lapel and a double necklace of pearls. She carried her bathing costume in a little blue suitcase, with the sandwiches she always brought, and a flask of tea. At the station buffet she had a gin and pep while they waited for the train, and another when they changed and had to wait again.

  Mr Hilditch attends the two o’clock showing of Basic Instinct and finds it unpleasant, but remains to the end since he has paid his money. Then he walks about the streets, admiring the terraces of pale, pretty houses with fanlights, the pillars that distinguish crescents and parades, the lofty statue of Queen Victoria in front of the town hall. But neither all that nor what remains with him of Basic Instinct is as efficacious as his companion of the morning in combating the intrusion that distresses him. As the shops begin to close, he judges the day a failure.

  Driving home again, he remembers Beth saying goodbye, the last moment before memory became too painful. She broke it to him suddenly: that tomorrow she planned to go south. Jakki said it first thing when he met her one evening, outside the home-decorating shop where they always met. Sharon didn’t tell him at all, and intended not to, but he guessed. Bobbi was the most casual. Elsie Covington said she’d miss him. Gaye cried, putting it on because she wanted money before she went.

  They are there, standing by his hall door, their backs to him at first, then turning to face him when they hear the car on the gravel. Their two faces are caught in the headlights, the one black and gleaming, thick lips drawn back, the other timidly peering at the glare. He has a few times wondered about their threatened return, resolving not to answer the doorbell without first ascertaining who was there. Slowly, tiredly, he switches off the engine of the car and extinguishes the lights.

  ‘Sir, we are happy to see you.’ The black woman speaks as soon as he steps on to the gravel.

  He locks the car door, then turns to shake his head at her smiling face. He doesn’t smile himself. He’s not in the mood for this: he lets that be seen.

  ‘Ten minutes out of your day, sir –’

  ‘My day has been a long one. I must wish you good-night. I must request you not to come bothering me again.’

  ‘Have you taken the opportunity to meditate on the story of Miss Marcia Tibbitts? As we agreed, sir?’

  ‘I didn’t agree to anything.’

  ‘A while back we called to see you, sir —’

  ‘Yes, I know, I know.’

  ‘We have been anxious to hear how my young friend’s tale has affected your troubled heart, sir.’

  Mr Hilditch is startled by this. His small eyes stare at Miss Calligary until he blinks in an effort to shake out of them the consternation he is unable to disguise.

  ‘Troubled?’ The word escapes from him without his wishing it to, his lips unconsciously giving voice to his alarm.

  ‘Sir, the girl you were a helpmeet to was not of our Church. A lodger only in our house, sir. Just passing by.’

  ‘You’ve got all this wrong —’

  ‘That girl makes a song and dance that she is stolen from, expecting a whip-round in the Gathering House.’

  ‘I’m telling you you’ve got your wires crossed.’

  ‘If she said different from just passing by it isn’t true. Better to consider my young friend here tonight, sir. Better to consider her joy as she stands before you.’

  The girl isn’t much to look at. Her nondescript hair grows in a widow’s peak and is pulled straight back and held with hair-clips. She is a small, rabbity girl.

  ‘Consider her daily trade, sir, before she came to know the promise of the Father Lord. Consider the grisly acts she sold across the counter, sir. Decapitation and viciousness, harems of animals. Unnatural practices, sir, the excitements of pain.’

  Mr Hilditch, hardly hearing what is said, continues to observe the small girl. He wonders if she’ll pass on from the people she has fallen in with and end up roaming. She has the look of that, an empty look that is familiar to him.

  ‘Soon the folk will come from all over for our Prayer Jubilee. May I ask you, sir, if you have rooms going spare in your house?’

  ‘Rooms? What’re you talking about?’

  ‘Sir, the folk come to rejoice.’

  Mr Hilditch wants to push past them and unlock his hall door and then to bang it in their faces. He wants to say that he will summon the police unless they go away, that they have no right to harass a person on his doorstep, that they are trespassing on private property. But no words come and he does not move forward.

  ‘For the future is written, sir, in the writing of certainty. There is fruit for all, heavy on the trees. And the green hills stretch to the horizon, and the corn is lifted from the land. See the foxes, sir, tamed in their holes, and the geese happy in the farmyard barn. Hear the cries of the children at play, and the voices raised in song for the Father Lord. That is the promise, sir. That is the future for the one who dies.’

  ‘Why are you talking to me like this?’ Hoarsely, and again involuntarily, the question escapes from him, asked before he realizes it. His voice sounds as though it is someone else’s, some angry person shouting. He does not mean to shout. ‘Why do you keep coming here? What do you want with me?’

  He pushes past them then, roughly elbowing between them. He drops his car keys and the girl picks them up and hands them to him, her fingers touching his but he doesn’t notice.

  ‘Do not come back here,’ he brusquely orders. ‘I don’t want to see you here again.’

  Unperturbed and undismayed, Miss Calligary advises him to consider what has been said. None of us can flee the one who dies, she asserts, for the one who dies awaits us when we, too, have been cleansed and are ready for the paradise earth. And then, as though there has been no objection to the visit, no turbulence or crossness, Miss Calligary adds:

  ‘There is solace for the troubled, sir.’

  A black hand is laid on Mr Hilditch’s arm. Miss Calligary’s even teeth are again on display. Marcia Tibbitts is writing in a jotter.

  ‘What’s she doing? What’s she writing down? This is a private house, you know.’

  ‘What is written is the address, sir – 3 Duke of Wellington, and the number of folk you have room for when the Jubilee is at hand. Sir, with the folk around you, you would soon discover a heart-ease. Until that time come we will not desert you.’

  Mr Hilditch’s hands are shaking, so much so that he cannot fit the keys into the locks of his door. He is obliged to turn his back in order to hide his agitation, and to steady one hand with the other. He does not respond to th
e request that he should lodge people in his house.

  In the Gathering House Miss Calligary reflects upon the irrational behaviour of the man who occupies 3 Duke of Wellington Road. Her efforts to rectify any misunderstanding there might have been inspired a response that causes her now to believe there was no such misunderstanding in the first place. Something else is the matter. When first they called on the man he refrained from interrupting Marcia Tibbitts’ personal saga, and while it is true that he made some small protestation when it came to an end, the nature of this was not out of the ordinary. Indeed, in Miss Calligary’s experience the more opposition there initially is the greater the conviction later. The intimation she experienced after their first encounter – that the man would sooner or later enter what the Priscatts call ‘a relationship’ with the Church that is her life’s work – is something she now finds herself questioning: clearly, more work needs to be done. For not only has the fellowship she offered been peremptorily rejected, it appears to have become a cause of alarm. Miss Calligary has more than once explained to the young companions who bear the Message with her that you can’t hope to get anywhere unless you persevere, that a lack of interest, even abuse, should not be permitted to upset or dishearten. But alarm is quite another matter; as a reaction, she has not experienced it before.

  ‘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.

  ‘H
ullo, 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.