Felicia's Journey

9

Buddy’s the cafe is called. An electrician is on a step-ladder, working at a fuse-box just below the ceiling. The ceiling is brown, stained with pools of a deeper brown. Behind the bar where the tea and coffee and food come from there is a row of Pirelli calendars, half-dressed models in provocative poses. An old man is smoking and reading the sports news in the Sun at a table in a corner. ‘I think a coffee,’ Mr Hilditch requests. ‘Would you mind fetching me over a coffee, dear?’ He closes his eyes and keeps them closed until she returns. ‘Is something wrong?’ he hears her ask again. ‘Ada’s not so hot,’ he whispers, with his eyes still closed. ‘They did an emergency on her, five this morning. She’s not so good.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’ The first time he took Beth to the A361 Happy Eater he observed the woman at the till deciding that Beth was his daughter, and he laid his hand for a moment on Beth’s knee the way a father never would. He glanced in the direction of the till and the excitement began because the woman was still staring, deciding now that the relationship was different. ‘I’m sorry,’ this present girl is repeating, and Mr Hilditch opens his eyes. ‘You get a shock like this you don’t want to be alone. Both of us with a shock, Felicia.’ Her red coat, unbuttoned in the cafe, has fallen back, and for the first time he sees the other clothes she is wearing: a navy-blue skirt and a red knitted jumper. Her hair has gone lank, the rims of her eyes have recovered a bit. She still wears the little cross on a chain around her neck: a Catholic girl, Mr Hilditch speculates, which stands to reason, coming from where she does. ‘You’re pregnant,’ he says softly. ‘Yes.’ They sit in silence. In many ways, he considers, there is nothing as tasty as a toasted bacon sandwich. Sometimes you find a café like this won’t do you one, but this morning they’ve struck lucky. Bacon sandwich’s, a handwritten sign advertises. ‘I think you should have something to eat, Felicia.’ ‘I’m not hungry.’ A mouthful or two is a comfort in distress, he quietly explains, better for you than a coffee on its own. They sit in silence again. He finishes the coffee she bought and rises to get them some more. ‘Mine was tea,’ she says. ‘Not a coffee, dear?’ ‘Coffee doesn’t agree with me at the moment.’ ‘Ah yes, of course.’ He pushes himself to his feet and goes to the counter. ‘Two bacon sandwiches,’ he orders from a small Indian woman, no taller than a dwarf, he considers. ‘A tea for my girlfriend and a coffee for myself.’ He smiles at the woman, knowing that the smile cannot be seen by the Irish girl. ‘Look lovely, those bacon sandwiches you do.’ The woman doesn’t acknowledge that. Often they don’t. He counts out one pound fifty-four, recalling an occasion when he was seated beside an Indian woman in a cinema and tried to strike up a conversation but she rudely moved away. Younger than the one serving him, she’d been on her own or else he’d never have presumed. ‘Sugar for the tea?’ he inquires. ‘My girlfriend likes a spoon of sugar.’ A sachet of sugar is thrown on to the counter and then, at last, there is a flicker of interest. Still not responding to his smile, the Indian woman notices the girl in the red jumper and for a passing instant – he’s certain of it – considers their relationship. He nods, confirming what he believes the woman’s speculation to be. They’re having a day out, he confides, his fiancée and himself. ‘You’ll find your friend,’ he says when he returns to the table. ‘If we failed at the factory, Ada said to me last night, we’ll find him where his abode is.’ ‘I thought I might run into him on the street. I didn’t realize the town would be so big.’ ‘Of course you didn’t. It’s understandable, that.’ ‘The town I come from myself –’ ‘It would be smaller, of course it would.’ Mr Hilditch inclines his head understandingly. Naturally it wouldn’t be the size of an English town, he agrees, you wouldn’t expect that. He wonders if the girl is religious since she’s a Catholic. It would account for a lot if she turned out to be religious, like Jakki was. She says again she’s sorry about his wife. ‘You don’t mind keeping me company for just a few more minutes? Only she’s dozy at the moment and they said best I should go. I told them I had a friend in the car and they said I’d be better off in the company of a friend.’ Mr Hilditch risks the shadow of a smile. ‘To tell the truth, it lifts my mind, just sitting here with a friend.’ He lets another silence gather. He likes to look at something tasty before he takes the initial bite: he was no more than five or six when that was first noticed in him. He likes to think about it. ‘Eat up, dearie,’ his mother used to press. ‘Mustn’t be a Mr Dawdle.’ ‘I have to tell you, Felicia, it isn’t a bolt out of the blue. A shock certainly, but not a bolt from the blue.’ She nods. She begins to say something. He watches her changing her mind. ‘ “I’ll maybe not come out,” she said on the way over last night. She faced it months ago. We all face it one day, Felicia.’ She nods again, at a loss for words, as any girl would be. There is a tiny dimple, almost unnoticeable, that comes and goes in one of her cheeks, affected by her change of expression. ‘I’m glad you’re going to have a baby, Felicia. It’s a help to me, that.’ ‘A help?’ ‘Another life coming. Ada going in at this particular time and you being here, and Ada concerned about you when 1 told her. A young Irish girl, I said, and she asked me what you looked like.’ She doesn’t comment on that. He bites into the crisp toast of his sandwich, savouring the chewy bacon and the saltiness. ‘Don’t you want the baby, Felicia?’ ‘I don’t know what to do until I find him.’ Again she struggles with tears, and then pulls herself together. ‘The father’s the young man we’re looking for, Felicia?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘To tell you the truth, I thought there might be something like that.’ ‘I don’t want to bother you with it.’ ‘Another person’s trouble can lift the mind, Felicia.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You understand me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I’ll drive you back when I’ve been to the hospital again.’ She says there is no need. She says she’ll maybe go out to the factory and make sure there hasn’t been a mistake. He shakes his head. ‘I don’t think there was a mistake, dear.’ The Indian woman is engaged in a shrill conversation on the telephone. Neither the electrician nor the old man in the corner has displayed any interest in them, but then they wouldn’t, people like that. Another thing is, the condition she is in hardly shows; you can tell all right, but it has to catch your eye. If she were bigger it might be a different kettle of fish, with the Indian woman noticing and speculating further. ‘Ada’d like to know I was still keeping an eye on you.’ ‘Will you be all right yourself?’ He shakes his head. You couldn’t be all right in circumstances like these, no one could. Finishing the second bacon sandwich, he wipes his fingertips with a paper napkin. ‘What I’m thinking of is your condition, Felicia. I’m just thinking that walking about with those carriers mightn’t be a help.’ To his surprise, she appears to lose track of the conversation.

She starts on about the missing address, saying it’s all her fault. She says again she didn’t want to be pushy. ‘I know what you mean, dear. I know how you feel, I’ve had experience. Some of the young squaddies I had under me were in a shocking state due to emotional harassment. Terrible to see them – decent, innocent young fellows, bowels all to pieces.’ ‘I’d have stayed at home waiting for him if it wasn’t for the baby.’ Mr Hilditch nods sympathetically. He allows a silence to gather before he says: ‘Are you thinking of having the thing terminated, Felicia? Do they have that over there?’ ‘There’s difficulties.’ ‘You could have it done here, of course. Any day of the week you could have the matter attended to.’ He pauses. ‘Old friend, is he? Your sweetheart?’ Bit by bit, it all comes bucketing out, as he knew that sooner or later it would. In a misty, uninterested way Mr Hilditch envisages the wedding there has been, the youngest of his companion’s three brothers marrying above himself, a priest conducting the ceremony, the gathering in a hotel lounge. Then, when the bride and groom are driving off, the young thug happens to pass by on the street and the trouble begins. Smiles in a dancehall, walks in the countryside, autumn leaves in the woods, hands held under a cafe table. And in no time at all he’s off with a suitcase, leaving her to fend for herself. ‘He’d have come back at Christmastime only I’d say his mother said not to when she heard about us. God knows what she told Johnny.’ ‘God knows indeed, dear. I know the kind the mother is. I’ve had experience there too.’ ‘He was always protecting her because of what happened to her.’ Mr Hilditch listens while he is told about that, encouraging the flow of revelation, keen now to form a picture of the circumstances. ‘I take to the sound of your friend,’ he says when the picture is complete. ‘He didn’t have my address any more than I had his. We both forgot about that. I thought at one time he might have phoned up someone he knows – Cathal Kelly or Shay Mulroone, someone like that. I thought he might get them to pass a message on to me.’ ‘You can’t blame him for not thinking of it.’ ‘I’m not blaming him for anything.’ ‘What I mean is it’s surprising the things you don’t think of at the time.’ There is more about the mother, who by the sound of her knows the price of carrots. It’s not an unfamiliar story, Mr Hilditch reflects as he listens; give or take a few details, a similar tale buckets out of most of them. Twice, seemingly, Elsie Covington had a go at her wrists before their paths crossed. Teenage depression she called it, although she was more than halfway through her twenties. ‘You’ve had a time of it,’ he says, remembering saying the same thing to Jakki in the Dewdrop near Brinklow. Weals on her back, Jakki reported she had, after some fellow took a buckle to her. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you all that. At a time like this –’ ‘It does you good to get it out, Felicia.’ He adds that he’s glad she felt she could. They’re being eyed now by the old man, who has tired of his newspaper. Two people with a trouble, he says again: it’s strange the way things turn out. No one ever looked after another person as beautifully as Ada did, he says. ‘ “You get yourself ready for it, dear” she warned me – oh, must be six months ago.’ But the girl isn’t listening; her mind isn’t on it, which again is understandable in the circumstances. He knows what she is preoccupied with, and alludes to it. ‘There are inquiries I could make, Felicia. As to his whereabouts.’ She shakes her head: the usual thing, not wanting to be a nuisance. He says: ‘The girl I have in the office is very good. If we put our heads together we’d track him down, no problem at all.’ ‘How would you?’ ‘The girl would phone up every lawn-mower outfit in the Midlands. Coventry. Nuneaton. Derby. King’s Brompton. You name it. Added to which, there are citizens’ registers and rates registers and housing registers. Would it be an intrusion to inquire as to your friend’s name?’ ‘Johnny his name is. Lysaght.’ ‘And how are you spelling that, Felicia?’ She tells him; he writes it down. ‘But I couldn’t put you to the trouble. Not with your wife –’ ‘Ada’d want it, dear. A heart as big as a house. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ ‘Maybe it’ll be all right. Maybe when you go back to the hospital they’ll tell you –’ ‘I know what they’ll tell me, Felicia.’ He doesn’t mind crying in public. His sobs come softly, tears caught for a moment against the rims of his glasses. Ada has her ways, he whispers, but she’d never hurt a fly. A face blinks in his consciousness, its shape lost in excess flesh, stupid eyes. A woman who came to Number Three to make chair-covers, called Ada by his mother. ‘Don’t blame me for putting off going back to that ward, Felicia. Just for the minute I can’t face them there.’ He blows his nose. He slips his spectacles off and wipes them. It will take only a few minutes in the hospital, he suggests. When he has been there they can go back to that factory if it’s what she wants. He returns to the counter for another cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits. She protests again that she can’t go on being a nuisance to him, and again he contradicts her, saying she is a help. They leave Buddy’s Café soon after that and return to the hospital. He spends the time in the staff canteen, where the biscuits are of better quality than the biscuits in the cafe. ‘They still want to keep her undisturbed,’ he announces in the car, and when they’ve driven to the factory he waits while further fruitless inquiries are made. Later, on the journey back to his home ground, he pulls up suddenly in a lay-by. He can’t go on, he whispers. He can’t face the empty house alone. He wipes his spectacles clear and sits staring through the windscreen, willing the girl to speak, willing her to say that they’ll keep together for a while, that together they’ll look for her friend. He has words ready, to explain that in the neighbourhood where he’s known it wouldn’t do for him to be seen in the company of a young girl, that if she wouldn’t mind crouching down in the back of the car when they reach the outskirts of the town it would help a lot. Especially with Ada in a hospital it would help. But the girl still doesn’t respond to what he has said about not being able to face the empty house alone. The girl doesn’t say anything at all. ‘It’s hard for me,’ he whispers, and drives on, not asking her to crouch down in case it upsets matters further, telling himself it’s not unusual that she should be silent. But when he turns into the driveway of Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road – taking a chance he has never taken before by arriving in daylight at his house with a girl in his car – she reaches for the door handle as soon as the car is stationary. Two people in a trouble, he begins to say, but she shakes her head, again insisting that she can’t be a nuisance to him at a time like this. Then, like a rabbit scuttling off, she is gone.