William Trevor - Felicia's Journey

One night, when too much has happened in a single day, Mr Hilditch resolves more firmly than before never to leave his house again, to barricade himself within it if need be, for how can he go about his cheery life, with this ugly mockery constantly there? How can he, who has furnished his gaunt rooms to his taste, who is respected and troubles no one, be the protagonist in this darkness that is suddenly lit up, like a film projected in a cinema? From his bathroom looking-glass his face looks back at him, the same face he has always had, but he takes no heart from that. He turns the pages of a photograph album and there is a plump child, with a seaside bucket and spade in a garden, and racing with other children at a school sports. His mother laughs with him, his Uncle Wilf lights a cigarette. Pigeons perch on his outstretched arms, one on his shoulder. First long trousers , his mother’s handwriting records. In a cupboard there are his Dinky cars, and other toys too: a Meccano set, a Happy Families pack of cards, a gyroscope he could spin on the point of a pin. He throws dice out on a Snakes and Ladders board. ‘The little chap always wins,’ his mother says, and there’s a school report that calls him attentive and neat. The badges that once were sewn into his Wolf Cub jersey are among these small mementoes, one with a brush on it, symbol of house-keeping assistance, another with a rake, for gardening. ‘I’m sorry you’re going,’ he said outside the home-decorating shop when Jakki told him, and later he drove out to the refuse-tip road and past the closed iron gates. A car went by when they were stationary in the lay-by, and he remembered being there before and having to go somewhere else because a car drew in beside them, a couple cuddling. With Bobbi that had been. ‘Well, thanks for everything,’ she had said ten minutes before.

Often, at night or in the daytime, his doorbell rings. The voice calls through the letter-box, offering him assistance through prayer. He listens for the reference to the Irish girl or to the one who dies. That doesn’t come but he knows that such references are cunningly withheld, that they would be there immediately if he opened his door. In the mornings he takes in his milk, checking first from a window that there is no one on his doorstep. After dark he shops from time to time for a few necessities, always careful to ascertain that nobody is waiting at his house when he returns. He answers a letter that comes from his superiors, inquiring if there has been a relapse. He affirms that there has been, but gives no more information. Nothing like that matters now. One early morning he stands in his shrubbery of laurels and looks down at his feet, at the layers of old leaves that cover the several patches of turned earth. He pokes with a finger: the used-up clay is dusty beneath the obscuring leaves. In the hell that possesses him he sees the laurel roots already creeping among bones half-stripped of their insects’ nourishment, the misshapen roots twisting in the clay. He sees himself: his face, afterwards, in the car, each time crying as uncontrollably as he did the day he caught his leg in the railings, when he was six. ‘Oh naughty, naughty !’ she exclaimed, cross because they were going to be late. Leave him for a moment and he does a thing like that! Two seconds she was gone and now she has to beg assistance of a policeman! ‘Easy does it, son. What goes in must come out, eh?’ And the policeman listened while he told him he’d only done it to see if his knee would fit between the two upright bars. ‘Ever so kind!’ she cried when the policeman was successful, and the policeman said all in the day’s work. ‘Call in for a drink when you’re passing near,’ she invited. ‘3 Duke of Wellington.’

Opening a tin of pilchards, thinking he might fancy them, he cuts his finger. He watches the blood run over the metal, not attending to the small wound at once, only drawing his hand away from the contents of the tin. Drips fall on the edge of the sink and the draining-board. What would analysis reveal about this liquid in which his own bones swim, which fuels his heart and gives him life? Is it different in some essence from the blood of other people? Is the torn flesh different also? He chatted to the young father in the waiting-room of that clinic, as any man might. He walked with others through the stately home; in his friendly way he remarked that it made an outing. He listened while the woman spoke of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and of her sister, who’d been untrustworthy. No one moved away from him when he spoke. That woman liked his cheerful face. He draws his great weight about his house, restless all day long. A stroke of bad luck, and then another and another. If the girl hadn’t stayed in the nutters’ house he would be going back and forth to his catering department as he has always done, content and occupied with his work. Instead, by chance she went there, allowing a black woman to threaten his privacy, poking and grubbing, flashing her teeth and her jewels, trapping him with her gibberish. A religious has a sixth sense, there have been cases. A religious can disturb you and play on your confusions until you can’t find the subtlety to ask the questions you want to ask and then say too much, your own worst enemy. ‘The little man’s his own worst enemy!’ He remembers that being said, the smile that emphasized the humour of it. And remembering, he is able for the first time to say it had to be the way it was: there was no option, no choice. Think of the Irish girl roaming the streets and you can see it at once. Think of her carrying, wherever she goes, what does not belong to her, spreading it about: you know immediately the other had to happen. And if he could find her there would be, once more, merciful oblivion: that’s how things are, he can tell that now. He breaks his resolution not to leave the house and again goes out to look for her. Again, she is not there.

He stares into his mother’s face, blurred and misty in the photograph he decorated with black crepe because he had to say this was his deceased wife. The eyes stare back at him, the features crinkled because his mother simpers lightly, a way she had. ‘Oh, wasn’t it lovely!’ she enthused when they stood in the bus queue after The Wizard of Oz . A Wednesday it was, cold for October. Egg in a cup as soon as they got home; egg in a cup and nice hot chocolate. ‘And how’s that knee?’ the policeman inquired when he called in for the drink she’d pressed on him. ‘All bright and beautiful again?’ And her voice came from upstairs, asking who that was, and he said, calling up to her, the policeman from the other day. ‘Well, isn’t this nice!’ was the comment she made in the dining-room, pouring out drinks, the helmet on the table. She’d put on her high heels before coming downstairs. ‘Cheers!’ the policeman said, and: ‘See you again,’ when he was leaving. And she said yes, why not? She found the name Ambrose in a novel. ‘Oh, years ago there was a Joseph,’ she said when he asked where that came from. ‘Just a beau.’ Joseph Ambrose Hilditch : he wrote it when they were asked in class to write their names in full one day. ‘Ambrose?’ a boy said afterwards. ‘Sissy, that.’ Ambrose Lafitte, a man who used to read the News, she said. As well as which, he was a cat burglar. The novel was a romance; she delighted in romances. People all over the nation would listen to the six o’clock News, not knowing that within a couple of hours the man reading it would be making his way over the rooftops, all in black. ‘Really caught my fancy,’ she said. ‘Ambrose.’ J. A. Hilditch : that became his signature, practised when he was fourteen, the J looped with the A, the middle of the surname unrecognizable. When he asked who Hilditch was she clammed up. No one much, she said. The brush salesman spread out his brushes for her, even though she’d called out nothing today when she heard him at the door. ‘He certainly can make you laugh!’ she said about the policeman when he’d been back a few times. And on another occasion: ‘Stop for the night, Uncle Wilf? Blustery outside, it is.’ In the Longridge tunnel it was with a man she’d never laid eyes on until a few minutes before. When the light began to flicker again she was tidying her hair, and the man bent down to pick up his mackintosh from the floor. Afterwards he spoke to her on the platform and she laughed when he’d gone, saying a person wasn’t safe in a railway carriage these days. Major Hilditch he once wrote down, privately, when no one was around. He never had to think about it if people asked what he intended to do with himself when he grew up. In films there were ATS girls and, still privately, he said to himself that that’s how one day it’ll be: walking with one of them beneath an arch of swords. Manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain; a house in Wiltshire that had been a rectory once, a garden, and a family growing up.