William Trevor - Felicia's Journey

23

In time Mr Hilditch returns to work. It is the best chance he has, he considers, of feeling himself again. He is welcomed in the kitchens and in the canteen and conscientiously devotes himself to the backlog in his small office. But his appetite has not returned, which continues to be something of an embarrassment for a catering manager. He explains it away as best he can, and it is generally remarked that he has not yet fully recovered from the ailment that laid him low for so long. Then, one afternoon, without warning, an adjustment occurs in his memory. Between the Irish girl’s going upstairs in her nightdress and the blue bus appearing on the drive of the stately home there emerges something else: there is the sound of footsteps on the stairs, of a door closing at the top of the house. In his recall there is his awareness that she knows, that there have been moments, that day and in the evening, when he saw the knowledge in her eyes. It is on a Tuesday that the remembrance occurs. The last day of March, twenty-five to four. Interrupted in his perusal of last month’s overheads, Mr Hilditch gazes at a calendar that hangs on his office wall and fails to register its familiar details: two children in Victorian dress blowing bubbles, the compliments of Trafalgar Soup Powders plc. The fragment of recall he experiences is more vividly projected than the scene that has been chosen by Trafalgar Soup Powders. He wept when she went upstairs again in her nightdress, already on her way to the beck and call of a father and two brothers, to a stifled life, to guilt on her conscience for ever more. The gramophone needle rasped on the record. The glow of the electric fire was pink on his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers. ‘A tea, Mr Hilditch,’ the tea woman offers. ‘I’ve brought it to you first.’ It is what the tea woman always says. He always gets his tea first, suitable treatment for a catering manager. ‘Thanks very much.’ He tries to smile and wonders if he succeeds. ‘Nice again,’ the tea woman comments, but he does not hear and so does not reply, which causes the tea woman later to remark that the malady that laid Mr Hilditch low has left him on the deaf side. His eyes drop from their sightless survey of the bubble-blowers on the wall. Print-outs cover the surface of his desk, the cup of tea on its saucer among them. He reaches out and mechanically stirs two lumps of sugar into the warm, milky liquid. On her way back to nothing, he repeated to himself in his big front room, on her way to a bleakness that would wither her innocence: what good was that to anyone? He called to her but she didn’t hear, and then he went upstairs to put it to her that they should go for a drive. All that comes back now.

He plays ‘Blue Hawaii’ again. He makes himself read the Daily Telegraph , cover to cover — foreign news, financial, a column about television programmes he has not seen, the gossip pages. He roasts a four-pound turkey breast, an effort to coax his appetite back. But what began in his office as a trickle of memory on a Tuesday afternoon becomes a torrent as more days go by. The night the Irish girl was in her nightdress his last task was to burn in his dustbin the garments he’d dotted about the place. The night Elsie Covington said she’d miss him he watched her eating a peach melba and then drove to the car park by the Canal Wharf, deserted on a Monday. ‘You’re planning to take off,’ he said to Sharon and she laughed. His memory flows destructively, the debris of recall seeming more like splinters from forgotten nightmares than any part of reality. For surely the moment of Gaye’s knowing, too, comes from some nightmare pushed away – her look, the way she glanced at him when she asked if he could spare a twenty just till she got on her feet again? The only one he’d endeavoured to explain to was the Irish girl. Her innocence drew it out of him: how they had called him by different names – Colin, Bill, Terry, Bob, Ken, Peter, Ray, any name that came to hand, they being the kind of girls who liked to use a name. No harm in a different name, any more than there was harm in a man in his position not taking a girl out locally. ‘I’m going south, Bill,’ Beth said, and neither of them spoke for a while, and he went on driving. ‘Where’re we headed?’ Beth asked, and out in the country he turned on to the refuse-tip road and drove on past the closed iron gates. ‘Where are we going, Bill?’ she asked again, her cigarette glowing in the dark. He said a surprise, drawing in to the lay-by where he’d once stopped to have a sandwich and a drink of tea from his Thermos. He had to watch the cigarette. He had to be careful; anything could happen with a lighted cigarette in a car. Afterwards he drove straight back to Number Three, taking her with him because that was best. Malign, unwelcome, the content of what has crept into his recollection causes Mr Hilditch to believe he is suffering from a mental aberration: that he is moving into madness is the only explanation he can offer himself. Every morning he parks his car in the factory car park and crosses the forecourt, greeting the employees who are about, and they return his salutation, unaware. Once in a while there is a dispute in the kitchens, two of the dishwashing women at loggerheads, and he reasons with them as he has always done. He tastes the food, he chats to afternoon callers. A team from Moulinex demonstrates its wares. And beneath the semblance of normality he achieves, scenes lightly flicker, and voices speak. His days become an ordeal, and on returning each evening to 3 Duke of Wellington Road he faces in private his suspicion that he is being deprived of sanity. He searches through the time that has passed from the moment when his unease began, reliving the first of his worried nights, recalling his effort to shake away the gathering obsession by his visit to the Spa, recalling his presence in the Goose and Gander. Why has he been picked out for attention by a black woman? Why cannot he eat? Why has he written false letters to his employers? Why do delusions now occupy his mind? Mr Hilditch has heard of such developments in other people’s lives, he has read of them in the Daily Telegraph : the normal balance of the mind upset for no good reason. He visits a library, a thing he has never in his life done before. He consults a number of medical books, eventually finding the information he seeks: Delusional insanity is not preceded by either maniacal or melancholic symptoms, and is not necessarily accompanied by any failure of the reasoning capacity. In the early stage the patient is introspective and uncommunicative, rarely telling his thoughts but brooding and worrying over them in secret. After this stage has lasted for a longer or shorter time the delusions become fixed and are generally of a disagreeable kind . It isn’t easy to know what to make of that. He sits in his car in the library precinct and while people pass close by, while other cars start and drive away, he tells himself that the fragments of nightmare are nothing more than that. None of this has happened. There was no girl, ever, in his house. There was no tale of a father and two twin brothers, and a bitter woman with a scar on her face. There was never Beth; wishful thinking, the others too. He is Hilditch, a catering manager, liked by the employees. Safe again in 3 Duke of Wellington Road, a house he has known all his life, where he cried as an infant and played on the stairs with Dinky cars, he attempts to dispel the fantasies that torment him, by whispering the words of ‘You Belong to Me’, accompanying Jo Stafford. But the fantasies nevertheless persist and when the record ends, when his big front room is quiet again, he stands in the middle of it, drained of the energy to assert his will. His lips don’t move, no sound comes from him, yet a voice is speaking, an echo in the room, his own voice telling him that this is real.