Felicia's Journey (7 page)

‘No,’ a postman says in the town she has come to, pausing in the emptying of a post-box, shaking his head. ‘Not known to me at all.’

She asks in shops. She asks two security guards and a woman at a bus stop. ‘No, you got that wrong, dear,’ a man who is waiting there confidently assures her. ‘No way Thompson’s was took over. Thompson’s went bust two years ago.’

‘Is there anywhere here that makes lawn-mowers?’

The man says definitely not and an hour later, in a police station, her question is repeated. ‘Anywhere on lawn-mowers these days?’ a desk sergeant calls through a hatch. Someone she can’t see makes a suggestion, but someone else says that’s history, packed it in in ’89 they did. ‘I doubt we can help you,’ the desk sergeant informs her, closing the hatch again.

Already he has confirmed that Thompson Castings went bankrupt two years ago, but in spite of this and the response of his colleagues he consults a directory.

‘Nothing here,’ he reports.

A second directory is leafed through, two telephone calls made, before she is assured, with even greater confidence than before, that what she seeks does not locally exist: lawn-mowers are not manufactured in this neighbourhood. Lawn-mowers are sold; there are showrooms, which might also possibly supply spare parts; it’s perhaps something like that she’s after. She is given a list of telephone numbers and spends the next hour in a call-box, not surprised when she is not successful. Storeman in a factory was what he said, definitely a factory.

‘No way we can help you further, love,’ the desk sergeant makes clear when she returns to him. Best to go back to where she came from this morning, he suggests, since that is the town that has been mentioned by her friend.

Overhearing the conversation, a second policeman looks up from his paperwork to agree. Needle in a haystack, Felicia hears one of them saying to the other as she leaves.

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.’