Felicia's Journey

6

At five past four, leaving the catering department early, Mr Hilditch drives to the bus station and finds a place in a car park from which he can observe the arrival bays. He is confident she’ll come back; as soon as she draws a blank she’ll return in order to pursue her search in another direction. That stands to reason, but of course it doesn’t preclude the chance that he might have missed her. She might easily have decided that it was all no good after an hour or two of making inquiries. All day he has been jittery on that count; at lunchtime he was in two minds about driving over to Marshring Crescent and hanging about there in the car for a while in case she returned. He drove by Number 19 just now, but naturally you can tell nothing from the outside of a house. Alert to the buses that come and go, Mr Hilditch presses coins into the pay meter in the car park and waits for a ticket to emerge. Shoppers, laden with their purchases, pass slowly by, young women shouting in frustration at their children, men dour and cross-looking. There is so much of that, Mr Hilditch considers as he makes his way back to his car, so much violence in the world, so much prickliness. Keep your Distance! a sticker rudely orders on the back window of a car. Surfers Do it Standing Up! another informs. I Want Madonna! a T-shirt message asserts. Mr Hilditch finds it all unattractive. A bus draws in and Mr Hilditch watches the passengers stepping off it: schoolchildren, an elderly couple, road repairers with their snap boxes and empty flasks in grimy canvas satchels. A longhaired man whom Mr Hilditch often sees on the streets is travelling about in search of work, he guesses. Factory workers, men and women, come in a bunch. The Irish girl is not among them. Hunched in a doorway, he thinks about her. Where looks are concerned, she’s not in the same league as Beth, but then very few girls are. And she certainly doesn’t have Elsie Covington’s spunkiness, Elsie with her shiny little knees cocked out, sitting sideways the way she used to, her lipstick glistening like a cherry. The memory of Elsie Covington inspires an ornately framed image in Mr Hilditch’s recollection, as if a photographer had once been present when she put on her film-star air – Barbara Stanwyck she used to remind him of, not of course that she had ever even heard of Barbara Stanwyck. Beth sits silent within another pretty frame, her long black hair reaching down to the slope of her breasts, her laced black boots ending where her thighs begin. Beth loved black. She used to blacken patches beneath her eyes, and whitely powder her face and neck to make a contrast. In Owen Owen in Coventry they bought a black dress with a lace bodice, the first of the many garments they bought together. All her underclothes were black: she told him that when he asked, the third time they were together it would have been, November 5th 1984, the Happy Eater on the A51, fireworks night, a Monday. The Irish girl brings it all back, the way a new friend invariably does, stands to reason she should. Memory Lane is always there, always shadowy, even darkened away to nothing until something occurs to turn its lights on. Mr Hilditch likes to think of it like that; he likes to call it Memory Lane, not of course that he’d say it aloud. Certain things you don’t say aloud; and certain things you don’t even say to yourself, best left, best forgotten. Many a time he has lain awake at night and willed the glitter to come – the little floating snapshots of Elsie and Beth and the others: Elsie with her hand raised for attention, Beth in her yellow jersey, Sharon coming out of the Ladies at the Frimley Little Chef, Gaye waiting for him outside the electricity showrooms in Market Drayton, Jakki lighting a cigarette in the car. The particular buses he’s watching for come once every forty minutes, but he doesn’t mind the wait because the potency of remembering is already running softly through his senses. The manager of an Odeon, in evening dress, flashed a smile at Beth in the foyer once: Leicester that had been, The Return of the Pink Panther. A boy attempted to pick up Elsie in the Southam Restful Tray, grinning from a distance at her, and she gestured across the tables, indicating that she was engaged. Jakki wanted to go to a church once, the time she had religion, and they went to a Baptist place in Coalville. In a Services on the M6 a boy was familiar with Gaye; no more than five foot that boy was, an ornamental razor blade on one of his ears and a shaved head, chunky, a trouble-maker, smelling of drink. In the Services near Loughborough Beth didn’t speak for the entire meal, not that she was cross, just thoughtful, as any girl has a right to be. ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’: Beth always reminds him of it, the lilting little rhythm somehow suits the memory of her. Another bus comes in. The Irish girl is on it.

Stepping into the crowd, Felicia searches with her eyes. The buses in the bays, in differently coloured groups, are lined up at an angle, their destinations indicated, their waiting drivers standing about. Latecomers are goaded into a run by the occasional starting of an engine; those already seated are impatient. The Friendly Midland Red, Midland Fox, Chambers’ Coaches, Townabout, are repeated designations. Felicia wills her friend to step from a recently arrived bus, but he fails to do so; nor does she glimpse him anywhere in the crowd. For the first time she wonders if she should just go home again, and wonders what it would be like, walking into the kitchen to face her father and her brothers. Seeking some indication of her movements, they would by now have discovered the letters she had intended to take away with her but left behind by mistake: long, sprawling letters she had written even though they couldn’t be posted. Every evening, in what seclusion the bedroom offered, while the old woman dozed or pored over another jigsaw, she wrote down what she thought would interest him: how Miss Horish from the tech backed her car into a petrol pump at Aldritt’s garage; how Aidan – under pressure from Connie Jo and Connie Jo’s mother and father – had already given up his trade and was now assisting in McGrattan Street Cycles and Prams; how the Pond’s rep had been footless in the chemist’s; how Cuneen the assistant with the short leg had been sacked from Chawke’s for falsifying. She made a calendar of the days until Christmas because he had mentioned Christmas as a time when, with a bit of luck, he might be back. She crossed each day off as it passed and then, when there were only nineteen left, she found herself writing a letter that was different from any she had written before… It is a trouble but there it is. I was late the first month and then again this one. There is no doubt about it Johnny. I thought maybe being with you like we were might cause it to be late but it is different now. I will be two months gone at Christmas and then we will have to decide what to do Johnny… That letter – the last she wrote – is with the others, secreted beneath her shell collection in the white chest of drawers beside her bed. On the night she wrote it, still lying awake hours afterwards, she wished that of all her letters she was able to post this one. The composing of the others – making up the sentences while she went about the shops or performed her household tasks – had been a consolation; once written down, the trouble she recorded now – not shared with anyone – acquired an extra dread. As she lay there sleepless after she’d completed the letter, she tried to think of better words than the words she’d used, some softer way of putting it. But all there was was the church bell striking one o’clock, then two and three and four, and the old woman’s watery gurgling, the bedsprings creaking as movement was attempted, the sudden gasp and then the breathing becoming regular again. When she was younger Felicia used to fear that her great-grandmother would die while she slept, that she’d be white and motionless in the morning, dead eyes staring. Among the waiting buses, the melancholy of that long night returns and Felicia’s spirits are as low as they were then – lower than on the ferry or in the desolate room where the security man interrogated her, or when she woke up on the train and didn’t know where she was, lower than when the policeman said a needle in a haystack. Still searching among the faces around her, she again experiences the sense of punishment she was first aware of the night she wrote the last of her letters: a call to order, a call to account for the happiness she had so recklessly indulged in. ‘Don’t worry about that side of things,’ he had reassured her once, as they hurried through the Mandeville woods. ‘All that’s taken care of by myself.’ Her face went red when he said it, but she was glad he had. ‘There’s nothing wrong in it,’ he murmured, saying more, nothing wrong in it when two people love one another. Yet the night she wrote the letter she felt that maybe, after all, there had been: the old-fashioned sin you had to confess if you went to Confession; the sin of being greedy, the sin of not being patient. And why should she have supposed that the happiness his love had given her was her due, and free? 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.