Felicia's Journey

8

The little hump-backed car is waiting at the end of Marshring Crescent even though Felicia is early. Its windows are misted up, but one of them is wound down as she approaches. The fat man smiles at her. He whispers, as if anxious not to disturb the sleep of the people in the nearby houses. He tells her to get in at the other door, remaining in the car himself. It isn’t yet fully light. As she settles her bags at her feet, she feels it is wrong that she should be sitting in the front and the man’s wife in the back. But she doesn’t say so because the engine has already been started. The car is actually moving before she realizes that the back seats are empty. ‘Your wife,’ she begins, suddenly alarmed. ‘I had to take Ada in last night. No warning whatsoever, they rang up to say the little op was put forward to ten this morning. I had to drive Ada over so’s they could prepare her.’ Bewildered and still uneasy, Felicia says she hopes he isn’t making this second journey on her account. ‘Ada’ll need me when she comes through. I have to be at the bedside. Digs all right, are they?’ His voice is squeaky. She hasn’t noticed before. He isn’t a man you can be alarmed about for long. ‘What?’ ‘The house you’re in? OK, is it?’ ‘It’s fine.’ ‘I’m glad to hear it. I wouldn’t like to think I’d misled you about Marshring.’ The huge shoulders beside her are motionless as he drives. Hands, ungloved and pale, seem disproportionately slight on the steering wheel. There’s hardly any traffic about. A joy to drive in the early morning, he remarks, and adds: ‘First time I met up with you I could see you were in an upset.’ ‘It’s just that I’ve come a long way.’ ‘And then again you’re in a country that’s strange to you.’ ‘Yes, I am.’ She explains how at first she found it hard to understand what people were saying to her, but that this is getting better the more she listens. ‘I hope I didn’t offend in that respect.’ An unexpected gurgle of laughter startles her. Two small eyes gleam humorously behind the thick spectacles. Pouches of flesh blur the features that are turned in her direction, teeth smile evenly. He smells of soap, a pleasant early-morning freshness that reassures her. The cuffs of his shirt are crisp and clean. ‘Soon as you spot your friend you’ll be tickety-boo. Soon as you know the state of play.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you mind if I ask you your name?’ She tells him; he doesn’t tell her his. ‘I never heard that one,’ he says instead. ‘Felicity we have over here.’ ‘My father found Felicia. Some woman he’d heard of.’ A woman who’d manned the barricades in 1916, who’d met her death there. There is a newspaper cutting about this person in her father’s albums, a photograph of a hard-faced woman in military uniform. ‘It’s nice,’ he says, ignoring the information about the revolutionary woman. ‘Felicia has a ring to it.’ ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ ‘I was never in your country, Felicia. Though I had a relative who used to talk about it. Beautiful country, I understand.’ ‘It’s all right.’ ‘You work at something, Felicia?’ ‘I had work in a canning factory. It closed a while back.’ ‘The unemployment’s terrible. Strictly speaking, you’re un-employed then?’ ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘And have you other family, Felicia? Father and mother still with us?’ ‘My father is. So’s my great-grandmother. I have three brothers, two of them twins.’ ‘Great-grandmother? She’d be an age, eh?’ ‘She’s nearly a hundred.’ ‘Well, I never!’ The landscape they are driving through has become familiar to Felicia: the well-used fields, grass drenched in a greyish fuzz, furnace chimneys breaking the flat monotony, the brick of factories. ‘That old lady would remember the Boer War.’ Felicia doesn’t know when the Boer War was, but she nods none the less. Once she would have known, at least for the length of one of Sister Francis Xavier’s history classes, but then she’d have forgotten because she had no interest. Her great-grandmother wouldn’t have been interested in a foreign war either. ‘Two relatives went down to the Boers,’ her companion divulges. ‘I’m from a military family.’ ‘I see.’ ‘I’ve had a regimental career myself. The army’s in my blood, as you might say.’ ‘You’re not in the army now?’ ‘I came out when Ada was first ailing. She needed care, more care than I could give, having regimental duties. No, I still help the regiment out, but it’s office stuff now.’ ‘At the factory where I met you –’ ‘Oh, no, no. No, not at all. I happened to call in there to see a friend. Well, as a matter of fact, to tell him Ada was going into hospital. People like to know a thing like that. No, I keep things straight for the regiment on the bookkeeping side now. Gets me out of the house, Ada says.’ Again Felicia nods. ‘You’d stagnate if you didn’t, Felicia. You’d stagnate in a big house, caring for an invalid wife, nursing really.’ ‘Your wife’s an invalid?’ ‘Best to think of Ada as that. Best for Ada, she says herself, best for me. It’s what it amounts to, as a matter of honest fact, no good denying it, no good pulling the wool. You follow me, Felicia?’ ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘If you face the facts you can take them in your stride. I had a sergeant-major under me said that, top-class man. You meet all sorts in a regimental career.’ ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ ‘Not long now, Felicia. You’re jumpy, aren’t you?’ Again there is the smile, the small eyes glinting at her, clear behind the thick glass discs. This is a kind man, Felicia reflects through her apprehension, kinder than the desk sergeant of yesterday, who became impatient in the end. ‘God, here she is again,’ she heard him muttering when she returned to the police station in the hope that he might have come by some further information. ‘Anyone’d be nervy in the circumstances, Felicia. This chap’s a boyfriend, is he?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, there you are. Naturally you’d want to locate a boyfriend.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Family at arm’s length, eh? Boyfriend not approved?’ ‘My father’s against him.’ ‘It can be awkward when there’s that. In conversation with you, Felicia, you can sense a spot of bother. I thought it might be family.’ She explains about her father, how he has got it into his head that Johnny is in the British army, how her great-grandmother was left widowed by the Troubles when she was married only a month, how there is always that in the family, a feeling for that particular past. ‘He’d have told me if he was in the army.’ ‘Of course he would. And if he has steady work and isn’t some fly-by-night why should the family worry? If he’s your choice and if you’re his, why should they interfere?’ ‘My father’s unreasonable.’ ‘I know what you mean, Felicia. Some of the young squaddies I had under me in the regiment had a problem or two of a similar nature. Trouble over the girlfriend, family at arm’s length. I used to father the poor lads, if you get my meaning. I’d bring them back to the house and Ada’d give them tea and pies and cake, a whole spread she’d have. We never had kids of our own, a great disappointment to Ada and myself. Fond of the boyfriend, are you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Not hard to believe he’s fond of you.’ For a further hour the conversation continues. Felicia hears more about the regiment, and about the factories they pass near, how the motorways have changed the face of England, how new towns have come to these parts, how people from Pakistan and the West Indies have begun to settle, changing the look of things also, how prosperity has given way to poverty in certain areas. At ten to eight the little green car creeps cautiously into a factory car park. ‘Thanks very much indeed,’ Felicia says. ‘I’m not due at the hospital just yet.’ In the same cautious manner the car is driven to the edge of the car park; and Felicia is informed that you have to be careful in case you plank yourself down in a space that is reserved for management or where parking is forbidden. Before you know where you are you could find your head being chewed off by some officious attendant. ‘We’ll see everyone who arrives from here,’ the fat man adds. Most would come by car, he says, and there’ll probably be a couple of buses just before half past eight. If somehow they miss her friend she can always make inquiries at the security barrier. ‘I don’t want to keep you from the hospital.’ ‘Ada’d want me to give you what help I could. A young girl wandering isn’t recommended in this part of the world, you know. You hear shocking things sometimes.’ ‘It’s very nice of you.’ ‘She’s always worried about a young girl wandering. Well, I told you. It was Ada who said to find out about any works where mowers would be manufactured. It was her initiative. Well, being a woman, I suppose.’ ‘I hope she’s all right.’ ‘I’d go in and have a word only they don’t like you to bother the patients before the ops. Better not to cause an excitement, I think it is. You know how it is, Felicia, a patient might want to go to the toilet if she got worked up due to a visitor.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘They don’t like that before an op. I know it from sad experience.’ She nods, only half hearing what’s being said now that they have reached the factory. In the night she dreamed that her father called her a hooer again, and a soiled young bitch. Her mother was alive, saying she wouldn’t have believed it of her, striking her with her fists, saying it was she who should be dead. In her dream she could see the sprawl of the convent at the top of steep St Joseph’s Hill, and the Square with its statue of the gaitered soldier, and vegetables lank outside the shops in the summer heat. There was the chiming of the Angelus; turf smoke was pungent on the air. Her father said they wouldn’t be able to hold their heads up when the sniggering began in the back streets. Carmel and Rose talked about it in the Coffee Dock. ‘Here’s something now,’ her companion remarks when cars begin to arrive. She is advised to wind down her window to give herself a clearer view.

It is not impossible that the boyfriend may actually appear. It is not impossible, but it is hardly likely. When he telephoned this works yesterday he spoke to the only person employed in the stores department, and that was a woman. The kind of store-keeping the boyfriend is doing is clearly in a retail outlet, after-sales service. Either she’d got it wrong about a factory or the boyfriend had been pulling the wool. Most likely the father was right when he said the army; pound to a penny, it was a young thug she’d got mixed up with, his eye on the main chance, which he’d been offered and had taken. Cramped behind the steering wheel, a slight ache beginning in the lower part of his back, Mr Hilditch watches the cars arriving and employees of both sexes moving into the factory. There are greetings, names called out, groups formed. At twenty past eight the buses arrive. ‘He’s not here,’ the girl declares in a woeful tone of voice when these buses have emptied. ‘The siren’s gone and he’s not.’ ‘You just slip across, dear, and ask at the barrier. It could be he’s nights. Or late turn. You never know. Better sure than sorry, eh?’ In her absence he goes through the two carrier bags she has left in the car. At the bottom of the second one, stuffed into the sleeves of a navy-blue jersey, are two bundles of banknotes. He hesitates for a moment, before transferring the money to an inside pocket of his jacket. ‘No,’ the girl reports when she returns. ‘He doesn’t work here. They don’t have a stores like the kind he described.’ ‘I’m sorry, Felicia. I’m really sorry.’ When, without warning, she begins to cry, the flesh of Mr Hilditch’s face creases in sympathy, puffing up around his tiny eyes. Between sobs he hears about a breakdown of communication, how the boyfriend failed to leave an address or telephone number behind, how she’d been frightened of seeming pushy. She was shy, the girl says, and he is put in mind of Elsie Covington, who couldn’t walk into a crowded room without suffering palpitations apparently. ‘I know, I know,’ he sympathizes. ‘It’s a horrible affliction, shyness.’ The boyfriend’s mother hadn’t been agreeable to handing over the address, and seemingly there was no one else who might have known it. All of it is worse, the Irish girl insists, because she knows that if she’d pressed for it he’d have given it to her immediately, no doubt about that. Pull the other one, is Mr Hilditch’s silent response before he turns the ignition on and drives slowly from the car park. He knows where the local hospital is: he went there once on the off chance that one of the night nurses might be tired enough to accept a lift. Walked off their feet, some of them, and the next thing is they could be giving the whole thing up, in need of help and advice from an older man. When the car is parked he says: ‘I’ll just pop in, dear, find out the state of play.’ The girl blows her nose in a tissue that looks to Mr Hilditch as if it has been used before. Young Sharon had a dreadful habit of keeping used tissues on her person, and cotton wool she dabbed her make-up with, and half-smoked cigarettes. ‘I’ll make off now,’ the girl says. The rims of her eyes are almost scarlet. Tears come again. ‘I’m OK,’ she says. ‘You be a good girl and hold on, Felicia. I’ll be gone five minutes, just get a report on her. Then we’ll maybe have a cup of tea and see what’s what.’ When her teeth show they glisten, due to a coating of saliva. Gaye had a gap between her two front teeth where saliva used to gather, but of course you can’t have everything. ‘I don’t want to be a nuisance to you.’ ‘You’re never a nuisance, Felicia. You’d never be that.’ In the hospital reception area he asks where the lavatory for visitors is, and follows the direction he’s given. He finds a telephone and rings the catering department to say he has been delayed that morning as a result of having to assist a neighbour who suffered a stroke in the night. Slowly he returns to the car park.

She will have to walk back to that factory to make certain. She should have made further inquiries, not just asked the security man. She shouldn’t have got into the car again; she should have said she’d like to be on her own, so that she could think about what to do next. But the disappointments that have accumulated, and the addition of this latest one, form a necklace of despair that shackles her will. Wearily she reflects that the man has been good to her: the least she can do is to accept his concern, and what use is there, anyway, in her searching? What point is there in endlessly asking and endlessly being told that people can’t help her, in tramping about, looking at the faces on the streets? She hears, again, the outraged protest of her great-grandmother when she burrowed beneath the old woman’s rubber sheet, extracting the clothes-peg bag and then returning it. ‘Get off out of that!’ came the cry from the depths of sleep, muzzy and confused. By now, they’d have been told at Doheny’s that she took the Dublin bus; by now Mrs Lysaght would have passed it around that while she was out at early Mass a week ago someone climbed in through her kitchen window, leaving mud on the sill and the spotless surface of her sink. Went to an airshow Sunday, a postcard with barges on it had said, his handwriting tidily sloping, loops and dots and crossed t’s. On the lined exercise paper of his brief letters there was never an address at the top. Father Kilgallen will summon her if she goes back now, the Reverend Mother too, both of them intent on preserving the life of the child that is her shame. ‘God damn you to hell!’ her father’s greeting awaits her. The car lurches on its springs as the fat man re-enters it. His breath is noisy in the small space. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers, hoarse from his exertions. When Felicia turns to look at him his pinprick eyes are staring vacantly. He makes no attempt to start the car. She watches him trying to steady the quivering in the hand that is closer to her, pressing it against the steering wheel. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asks, her attention wrenched away from her distress. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘A cup of something,’ he mutters, reaching into a pocket for his car keys. ‘We’re both in need of a hot beverage.’