William Trevor - Felicia's Journey

Two girls are putting on deodorant, passing the roll-on container to one another, the buttons of their shirts undone. ‘Sorry,’ Felicia says when she has been sick, but the girls say it doesn’t matter. There can’t be much left inside her, she thinks, because she hasn’t had much to eat that day. ‘Take a drink of water,’ one of the girls advises. ‘We’ll be in in twenty minutes.’ The other girl asks her if she is OK, and she says she is. She brushes her teeth and a woman beside her picks up the toothbrush when she puts it down on the edge of the basin. ‘God, I’m sorry!’ the woman apologizes when Felicia protests. ‘I thought it was the ship’s.’ Typical of her to go out somewhere at a peculiar time like this, her father would have said when she wasn’t there to assist with the breakfast frying; typical of the way she is these days. He wouldn’t have found the note until he went in with the old woman’s breakfast. ‘She’s taken herself off,’ he’d have told her brothers and there wouldn’t have been time to talk about it before her brothers left for the quarries. She wonders if he went to the Guards; he mightn’t have wanted to do that in spite of everything, you never knew with him. But he’d have had to call in next door to ask Mrs Quigly to keep an eye on the old woman during the day, to give her her cream crackers and half a tin of soup at twelve, the way Mrs Quigly always used to when Felicia was still working in the meat factory. Announcements are made. There’s a flutter of activity among the passengers, suitcases gathered up, obedient congregating in a designated area. A blast of cold air sweeps in when the doors are opened for disembarkation, and then the small throng moves forward on to the gangway. In the evening, when her father and her brothers had returned to the house, they’d have sat in the kitchen, with the note on the table, her father shaking his head slowly and mournfully, as if he in particular had been harshly treated: everything was always worst for her father. One of her brothers would have said he’d go down to McGrattan Street to tell Aidan, and whichever one it was would have called in at Myles Brady’s bar on the way back. Her father would have cooked the old woman’s supper and then their own, stony-faced at the stove. Felicia’s nervousness returns as she passes with the other passengers into a bleak, unfurnished building in which a security officer questions her. ‘Have you means of identification?’ he demands. ‘Identification?’ ‘What’s your name?’ Felicia tells him. He asks if she has a driver’s licence. ‘I can’t drive actually.’ ‘Have you another form of identification?’ ‘I can’t think that I have.’ ‘No letter? No documentation of any kind?’ She shakes her head. He asks if she is resident in the UK and she says no, in Ireland. ‘You’re here on a visit, are you, miss?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And what’s the purpose of this visit?’ ‘To see a friend.’ ‘And you’re travelling on to where?’ ‘The Birmingham area. North of Birmingham.’ ‘May I look through your bags for a moment? Would you mind just stepping aside, miss?’ He pokes about among her clothes and the extra pair of shoes she has brought. She thinks he’ll comment when he comes across the banknotes in her handbag, but he doesn’t. ‘I’ll just jot down the address of your friend,’ he says. ‘Would you give me that, please?’ ‘I don’t know it. I have to find him yet.’ ‘He’s not expecting you?’ ‘He’s not really.’ ‘You’re sure you’ll find him?’ ‘I will, through his place of work.’ Her interrogator nods. He is a man of about the same age as her father, with a featureless face. He is wearing a black overcoat, open at the front. ‘I’ll just jot down your address in Ireland,’ he says. She says she is from Mountmellick, the first town that comes into her head. She gives an address she makes up: 23 St Mary’s Terrace. ‘Right,’ the security man says. No one stops her at the Customs. She asks where the trains go from, and is directed. When she makes further inquiries she is informed that the train for Birmingham isn’t due to leave until a quarter past two. It is now just after midnight. For a while, in the waiting-room, she sleeps. She dreams: that she is shopping for meat in Scaddan’s, that Mr Scaddan thumps a huge cut of liver on to the weighing-scales and says he took it out of the bullock himself. This isn’t true; in her dream she is aware that it isn’t; Mr Scaddan is well known for his tall stories. One of the young Christian Brothers comes into the shop and Mr Scaddan says it is a disgrace, but she doesn’t know what the butcher is talking about. ‘I was out for a walk one night,’ he says to the Christian Brother. ‘Down by the old gasworks.’ She knows then. The train comes in, long before it’s due to go out again. Felicia makes certain it is the right one, and when the journey begins she falls asleep again. Wakened by the ticket-collector, she is drowsily confused for a moment, not knowing where she is. The man is patient while she searches in her handbag for her ticket. Her mother’s calm features are snagged in her consciousness, the residue of another dream. ‘Thank you,’ the man says, passing on. The dream about her mother has gone; but although she cannot recall what it was about, it has stirred her memory. ‘Hurry now, for Mrs Quigly,’ her great-grandmother ordered her that day, ages ago. ‘And tell Father Kilgallen he’s wanted quickly.’ The old woman was holding a cup of tea to her mother’s lips and her mother’s eyes were half closed; her cheeks were the colour of cement. ‘Mrs Quigly! Mrs Quigly!’ She was six that day, banging the letter-box of the house next door. Later she had to run to keep up with Father Kilgallen’s urgent stride in Main Street and the Square, and when they got to the house Mrs Quigly and the old woman helped her mother into the bedroom. Father Kilgallen whispered there, and then her brothers came in from the Christian Brothers’ and Aidan went to get her father from the convent garden. It was her father who drew the sheet over her mother’s face, a last few minutes he had with her while they waited in the kitchen and Aidan cried. The satchel with her schoolbooks in it was on the floor where she had dropped it, light-blue and shiny, Minnie Mouse with pink shoes on the flap. ‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Quigly said, taking her apron off after she’d crossed herself, the flowers on it too garish now. ‘Thank God,’ Father Kilgallen said because he had arrived in time. ‘I’ve outlived another one,’ the old woman said. The train judders on, rattling on the rails, slowing almost to a halt, gathering speed again. Felicia opens her eyes. A hazy dawn is distributing farmhouses and silos and humped barns in shadowy fields. Later, there are long lines of motor cars creeping slowly on nearby roads, and blank early-morning faces at railway stations. Pylons and aerials clutter a skyline, birds scavenge at a rubbish tip. There’s never a stretch of empty countryside. The train fills up. Newspapers are read in silence, eyes that meet by accident at once averted. Everything – people and houses and motorcars, pylons and aerials – are packed together as if there isn’t quite enough room to accommodate them. Faces acquire an edginess when the train threatens to stop even though it isn’t at a station. Johnny will be going to work, too: Felicia imagines him, hurrying as everyone else is, but carefree, not worrying about it, because that is his way. For as long as she can she retains an image of his easy-going expression, then of his profile the afternoon he took the bus himself, the last time she saw him, when he didn’t know she was still in the Square; as a faraway, whispering echo, there is the murmur of his voice.

2

Although he does not know it, Mr Hilditch weighs nineteen and a half stone, a total that has been steady for more than a dozen years, rarely increasing or decreasing by as much as a pound. Christened Joseph Ambrose fifty-four years ago, Mr Hilditch wears spectacles that have a pebbly look, keeps his pigeon-coloured hair short, dresses always in a suit with a waistcoat, ties his striped tie into a tight little knot, polishes his shoes twice a day, and is given to smiling pleasantly. Regularly, the fat that bulges about his features is rolled back and well-kept teeth appear, while a twinkle livens the blurred pupils behind his spectacles. His voice is faintly high-pitched. Mr Hilditch’s hands are small, seeming not to belong to the rest of him: deft, delicate fingers that can insert a battery into a watch or tidily truss a chicken, this latter a useful accomplishment, for of all things in the world Mr Hilditch enjoys eating. Often considering that he has not consumed sufficient during the course of a meal, he treats himself to a Bounty bar or a Mars or a packet of biscuits. The appreciation of food, he calls it privately. Once an invoice clerk, Mr Hilditch is now, suitably, a catering manager. Fifteen years ago, when his predecessor in this position retired, he was summoned by the factory management and the notion of a change of occupation was put to him. As he well knew, the policy was that vacancies, where possible, should be filled from within, and his interest in meals and comestibles had not gone unnoticed; all that was necessary was that he should go on a brief catering course. For his part, he was aware that computers were increasingly taking their toll of office staff and when the offer was made he knew better than to hesitate: as a reward for long and satisfactory service, redundancy was being forestalled. Mr Hilditch occupies on his own a detached house standing in shrubberies that run all around it, Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road. In 1979 his mother died in this house; he never knew his father. Left on his own at the time of the death, he committed to auction the furniture that had accumulated in his mother’s lifetime and from then on made Number Three solely his. Visiting salerooms at weekends, he filled it with articles, large and small, all of them to his personal taste: huge mahogany cupboards and chests, ivory trinkets for his mantelpieces, secondhand Indian carpets, and elaborately framed portraits of strangers. Twenty mezzotints of South African military scenes decorate the staircase wall, an umbrella-stand in marble and mahogany vies for pride of place with a set of antlers in a spacious hallway. Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road is commodious enough to contain all Mr Hilditch has purchased: built in 1867 to the designs of a tea merchant, it spreads from this lofty entrance hall to kitchen and pantries at the back, and reception rooms of generous proportions to the left and right of the hall door. Upstairs, that generosity is repeated. Four bedrooms open off the first-floor landing, with a further four above them. Ceilings are rich in plasterwork mouldings and cornices. Ornate gas lamps, no longer in use, still protrude from the walls. Mr Hilditch regularly dusts them, an attention that over the years has resulted in a dull glow on the protuberances of the decoration. In spring and summer he attends to the shrubberies, keeping them clear of weeds, though not growing anything new. He sweeps up the fallen leaves in autumn and from time to time repairs the wooden boundary fences. The private life of Mr Hilditch is on the one hand ordinary and expected, on the other secretive. To his colleagues at the factory he appears to be, in essence, as jovial and agreeable as his exterior intimates. His bulk suggests a man careless of his own longevity, his smiling presence indicates an extrovert philosophy. But Mr Hilditch, in his lone moments, is often brought closer to other, darker, aspects of the depths that lie within him. When a smile no longer matters he can be a melancholy man. But on a Wednesday morning in February Mr Hilditch is aware of considerable elation: once a fortnight on Wednesdays the factory lunch includes turkey pie, and a fortnight has passed since it was on the menu. He dwells upon this fact as he fries his breakfast eggs and sausages and bacon, and toasts pieces of thick-sliced Mother’s Pride. It lingers in his thoughts while he eats in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat at the kitchen table, and while he washes up at the sink. Temporarily, at least, the anticipated lunchtime dish recedes then. He lowers the drying-rack from the ceiling, drapes the tea-cloth he has used over a rail and raises the rack again. He visits the lavatory with the

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