Felicia's Journey

20

As he often does on a Sunday, Mr Hilditch visits a stately home. Arriving early, more than an hour before he will be able to gain admission, he parks his car in the empty car park, spreads his mackintosh coat on the grass beneath an oak tree and eats the sandwiches he has made: tuna and egg, with lettuce, tomato and spring onions. The car park is a level expanse that has been cut into a hillside; from his position under the tree, he can see most of the long, tarred drive that winds through parkland, and the house itself, a sprawl of red brick and stone, with turrets and chimneys, and walled gardens. Swards of crocuses bloom close to where he picnics. The bark of the tree is jagged on his back. He watches a blue bus turning in at the distant entrance gates, and coming closer on the drive. It disappears for a moment below the edge of the hill; the sound of its engine reaches him before it comes into sight again. Creeping into the car park, it reverses, moves forward, repeats these manoeuvres before finally positioning itself. A chatter of voices begins as its passengers step out; a girl in a blue uniform makes an announcement, saying that everyone should be outside the gift shop at half past four. The passengers disperse, descending by different paths to the house. Left alone, the driver lights a cigarette and spreads a newspaper out on a rustic table. Cars appear on the drive, and eventually turn into the car park also. A second bus – yellow and grey – arrives, disgorging further visitors to the house. Mr Hilditch watches them stretching themselves and setting off in pairs or groups. Then, having finished his sandwiches, he unwraps a KitKat before making his way in the same direction. He feels as he always does when a friendship has come to an end: empty, some part of him deflated. Already the Irish girl has joined the others in his Memory Lane: her round, wide-eyed face stares back at him when he thinks of her, the image as luminously alive as that of Beth or Elsie Covington. He always plans an outing as soon after a parting as is possible, in an effort to combat the lowness of his spirits. The day after Gaye went he came to this selfsame stately home. In the gardens that are spread out around the house Mr Hilditch lingers while shrubs and flowerbeds are examined by the other Sunday visitors, the winter buds identified. He keeps with the crowd; he is not in a hurry. ‘Nice, this time of year,’ he remarks to two women, sisters they seem like. ‘Nature lying low, eh?’ The women are amused by that, and smile. At a turnstile that leads into a cobbled stable-yard the charge for adults is a pound. Mr Hilditch pays, and passes with the others into the kitchen quarters of the house, where antique cooking utensils are laid out to offer a flavour of the past. Pantries and sculleries have been scrubbed clean and are empty except for vast copper jelly moulds and domes of fly-proof mesh. ‘Fascinating, eh?’ Mr Hilditch remarks to a couple who are admiring a device that turns butter back into cream. His enthusiasm is genuine, since professionally he finds much to interest him. Upstairs, in a high square hall with pillars, and in a dining-room and other reception rooms, life-size models of footmen stand in stately idleness. Petrified housemaids dust volumes in a library, or polish the surfaces of ornate tables. A family that occupied the house is recalled from another age also, in conversation or performing on musical instruments, or dancing; a girl brushing another girl’s hair; a solitary figure reading on a window-seat. Tasselled red ropes separate each display from the living observers who now file whispering by. In the scented bedrooms there are scenes of discreet undressing, hipbaths ready. As the hours pass, the tranquillity of the house and its landscape continues to please Mr Hilditch. In the cafe next to the gift shop he is served by girls wearing flowery dresses that reach down to their shoes, but it is too soon yet even to wonder if any one of them would appreciate the warmth of friendship: today there is no need for that. ‘Makes an outing,’ he remarks in an easy way to the people he shares a table with. ‘Fills a Sunday, eh?’ The people politely agree that it does, then continue with the conversation his comment has interrupted. When they rise to go, Mr Hilditch smiles and says goodbye. The last to leave the cafe, he purchases, as he pays, some of the cakes and scones that are left over. The two buses and most of the cars have driven off by the time he reaches the car park. As he eases himself behind the steering wheel, he sees again the girl he last befriended and with that image drives slowly through the dwindling twilight. When he arrives in Duke of Wellington Road, darkness has long ago preceded him and for a few moments he sits in his car after he has drawn it up on the gravel, not wishing to open the front door and step into the hall until he has gathered a little strength that may be of assistance in the silence of the house. In time he finds it, and mounts the four steps to his hall door.

Later that same evening, depositing garbage in his dustbin, Mr Hilditch is aware of a faint aroma of burning cloth when he lifts the dustbin lid. He passes no private comment upon this, nor is his curiosity stirred: not even remaining as a smudge in his recollection is his burning, the night before, of various women’s garments and accessories, having started the blaze in his dustbin with the day’s newspaper and half a cupful of paraffin. Nor does he in any way recall that he returned his mother’s shoes to the outside shed where they had gathered mildew before recently he found a use for them. Nor that he picked up a bar of a fire-grate from the tiles in his hall and threw it into the shrubberies. It is usual, when a friendship finishes, for Mr Hilditch to suffer in this manner. He is mistily aware that something may be missing and attributes the aberration in his memory to the intensity of his loss – the moment of each departure having been so painful that an unconscious part of him has erased the surrounding details. At first, when Beth went, this concerned him, and he endeavoured to find his way back to the moment and all that accompanied it. He was not successful, and has since accepted the lapses he has experienced as offerings of mercy, private even from himself, best not questioned. This evening, after he has eaten, he sits in his big front room, indulging in the day he has spent: the crocuses in bloom, the passengers stepping out of the blue bus, the copper jelly moulds, the girl brushing her friend’s hair. He derives consolation from these unexacting recollections, one succeeding another, then fading away before returning, the images stark and soundless. He does not, this Sunday evening, play music on his gramophone; his mood is not for music, as it never is when a friendship has ended. It will be a day or two before music is heard again in 3 Duke of Wellington Road, Tuesday probably, or Wednesday. At half past nine Mr Hilditch ensures that his front door is locked and the back door bolted. He is in bed, and asleep, by five past ten.

During the following several weeks Mr Hilditch goes about his professional tasks with the care and attention for which he is well known at his place of work. At weekends he cleans his house – the hall and the stairs, his dining-room and big front room. He sweeps his backyard and rakes the gravel at the front. He shops in Tesco’s for supplies. He relaxes with his records and the Daily Telegraph. In idle moments, or in bed at night, he is drawn into the surroundings he so often heard about during the friendship that has ended: the bedroom shared with a woman in her hundredth year, the square with the statue of a soldier, the diamond-patterned table-tops of the café. The father and the twin bachelor brothers are there, the convent friends, the mother of the seducer. In Mr Hilditch’s private life there is nothing new about this excursion into someone else’s background. When Beth went, he found it hard to rid his thoughts of the pimps she had told him about, who had once pursued her; when Gaye went there were the house-breakers she had assisted. There was Sharon’s impetigo when she was a kid, Bobbi’s blind eye. The Irish girl’s name was found by her father, honouring some woman who took part in a revolution: it was in the car he heard that, or in Buddy’s Cafe, hard to be exact. ‘Very tasty, them faggots,’ an employee remarks, as well he might in Mr Hilditch’s view, since under his precise instructions the faggots have been skilfully prepared and cooked. ‘Glad you enjoyed them.’ He smiles his gratitude. Compliments are welcome when a finished association is still raw in his thoughts. Another employee comments on the marmalade pudding and he gives away a secret: that the suet must be finely chopped, that the marmalade and the beaten eggs must be added to the dry ingredients, not the other way round. He points out that the process and the measurements vary according to whether the pudding is steamed or baked. Since childhood he has preferred it steamed himself. The women among the employees often request a recipe and invariably choose to approach him rather than a member of the kitchen staff. He likes to oblige them in this way. It pleases him to think of the canteen dishes being served to the employees’ families. ‘Mr Hilditch’s pudding’ or ‘Mr Hilditch’s way of doing it’ might be expressions used. Although he never mentions it, he believes that this may be so.

‘See, we live in a miracle. Look here at this garden. See the fruits of the trees and the peoples of all nations.’ A black woman, bejewelled and painted, proffers a lurid illustration on the cover of a brochure. A young white girl, tidily attired, stands at her side with a sheaf of similar illustrations. Mr Hilditch, who has been interrupted in the polishing of his shoes at the kitchen table, greets the pair genially, but indicates his lack of enthusiasm for the conversation that threatens by shaking his head. ‘Today we bring you the Word of our Father Lord,’ the black woman continues, ignoring his response. ‘I myself am from Jamaica. This here is Miss Marcia Tibbitts. If my friend and myself could just step inside we wouldn’t take up no more than ten minutes of your day. May I inquire, sir, if you are familiar with the writings of the Bible?’ Mr Hilditch is not particularly familiar with the writings of the Bible. As a child, he was packed off by his mother every Sunday morning to Sunday school. Vaguely he remembers outlandish stories about lambs sacrificed and sons sacrificed, and walking on water. It is all a long time ago and he has never felt the need to reflect on any of it. What Would Jesus Do? an inscription in coloured wools speculated, shown to the Sunday-school class by its teacher. She had turned it into a decoration for her walls, framing the glass that protected it with passe-partout. ‘I’m afraid I’m not interested.’ ‘If we could step inside your home my friend would offer you her own experience, how she was gathered in.’ Again Mr Hilditch shakes his head, but does not succeed in halting a tale about being rescued from a video shop, and the promise of the paradise earth in which serpents lie harmlessly coiled and the cobra is a plaything for children. ‘I was lost and have been found,’ the white girl states in a singsong tone. ‘As it is written.’ Then she begins again, about the video shop and the better world of the cobra as a plaything. ‘Look here,’ Mr Hilditch interrupts at last. ‘I’m busy.’ ‘We would return,’ the black woman offers. ‘We would come at any hour.’ ‘No, no.’ ‘Ten minutes of any day is not much sacrifice to make. The Father Lord gives us time eternal.’ The black woman displays a mouthful of healthy teeth and pushes at Mr Hilditch the brochures she carries. ‘There is a future for the one who dies, sir,’ she adds, her tone intimating that the literature on offer reveals further details of this claim. It is then, while she is still speaking about the one who dies, that Mr Hilditch notices, and is bewildered by, a sudden curiosity breaking in her dark features. Being professionally familiar with the practices of salesmanship and assuming that the toting about of religion can fairly be placed in such a category, he wonders if this is some kind of selling ploy. But to his consternation and alarm, the explanation is not a commercial one. ‘An Irish girl mentioned you, sir. I remember that now as we stand here. A good man, the girl said, a helpmeet to her. Duke of Wellington Road, she said. Big and big-hearted was maybe the description.’ ‘I know no Irish people at all.’ ‘You helped that girl on her way, not passing by on the other side. Sir, you are at one with our Church.’ ‘No, no. I’m sorry. I have to get on. This isn’t my kind of thing.’ ‘That girl was chattering, it came up like that.’ Miss Calligary pauses. ‘A confidence trickster, as it turned out after.’ ‘I must ask you to go now.’ ‘That girl tried to get money from us. Is this the same story for yourself, sir?’ Mr Hilditch closes his hall door with a bang, and leans against it with his eyes closed, remembering how the girl said she’d spent a few days in these people’s house. He goes over the encounter that has just occurred, from the moment when the black woman suddenly realized she was talking to someone she had heard about. Mentioned? ‘An Irish girl mentioned you’: what exactly did that imply? Chattering, the woman said, and then something about a confidence trickster, whatever that meant. For a moment Mr Hilditch wonders if the whole thing isn’t some kind of error or misunderstanding: by no stretch of the imagination could the Irish girl he has associated with be called a confidence trickster. Others he has known could be described in that way, but it’s the last expression you would use where this recent girl is concerned. And yet clearly it is the same girl: a girl he helped, going out of his way to do so. She said so herself; apparently, she’d repeated it to others. Slowly, he eases his bulk from where it rests against the hall door and moves across the hall to the kitchen. It’s nothing much, he assures himself, no more than an untidiness, a trailing end; if it seems out of the ordinary it’s only because it has never happened before. A girl he has been good to has never afterwards been mentioned to him by anyone.

‘Right as rain that man was at first,’ Miss Calligary remarks as she and her companion make their way along Duke of Wellington Road. ‘Right as rain and then he goes peculiar.’ It worries Miss Calligary that this has happened. This big, stout man was there for the gathering; she would have sworn it. A solitary man, a lonely man: anyone could tell. He could have got the wrong end of the stick, thinking that the Irish girl was a Gatherer herself and backing off now for that very reason – once bitten, twice shy. Miss Calligary ear-marks a day for their return, requesting Marcia Tibbitts to note the number of the house.