William Trevor - Felicia's Journey

He winds the clocks in his big front room. All the years he has lived with them he has liked to hear them tick, soothing after a tiring day. He cleans the room with his Electrolux, and the hall and stairs, and his bedroom. He mops the vinyl of the bathroom and the lavatory, and scents the air with a herbal fragrance. Such activities momentarily keep his thoughts at bay, but when he rests they are there again. Had she always foreseen, when he was six and eight and ten, when he sat beside her watching Dumbo , and Bambi , when first he practised his signature, when he wrote down Major Hilditch : had she always known that she would turn to him when there was no one else? When the insurance-man winked and said no time for anything today, did she foresee – already – what would happen in this house? The barman at the Spa said the wife had put her foot down, no more hanky-panky. After a few months the policeman didn’t drop in any more. ‘No, I’d best get back,’ Uncle Wilf whispered on the landing. Had she foreseen it when he played with his Dinky cars or, before that, when the steps of the stairs were too steep for him, when she took his hand to help him? Had she foreseen it when first she said, ‘Just you and Mamma in their own little nest’? Or was it all different, the spur of the moment when she woke him up to show him the rings on her fingers? His blue-striped pyjamas, a shred of tobacco on her teeth when she smiled down at him, her ginny breath: in his private life, the occasion has always been there, never lost – not for a moment – in the oblivion that kindly claimed the other. Like a tattoo, she said, the lipstick on his shoulder. Her face was different then.

He scours his saucepans. He removes the enamel surround of the electric stove and cleans the metal plates beneath the rings. He defrosts his refrigerator and washes its shelves and containers. Her powder was scented; it clogged the pores on the two sides of her nose, a shade of apricot. She said she liked the best in the way of powder, and she sat there, afterwards, at the looking-glass, passing the puff over her skin. Lovely skin in its day, she said, and she slipped her eyelashes off, and he could see that in the looking-glass too. ‘Have to dress up for a chap!’ she said. A Saturday it was.

Again there is the ringing of the doorbell, again the attempt to communicate through the letter-box. Protected already by the Yale and the double lock, he has bolted the door as well, at the top and bottom, and has bolted his back door also. He keeps the curtains drawn across his downstairs windows, but not to disguise the fact that he is in the house: his car on the gravel indicates his presence, and after dark there are chinks of light. It’s just that he likes the curtains drawn now. ‘Hullo, hullo,’ the voice of the black woman booms in the hall until it’s drowned by the voice of Rosemary Clooney.

You could see Beth thinking it; you could see her searching her thoughts and finding it. And Elsie Covington, then the others: they broke in somehow. They trespassed on his privacy even though he took them places and lavished a bit on them in their time of need, the Irish girl too. You could tell, from the way she stood there in her nightdress, that she respected neither his house nor himself because she knew. Beth would have passed it on when she had a drink in; Elsie would have, to some man who picked her up. When the Irish girl went he said he didn’t want the light. But the hall was illuminated behind her, and if she came close to him it would be there again in her eyes. It was because he looked away that she ran off, her footsteps on the gravel, not stopping at the car even though he’d made the car ready for her. It had to be the car; he couldn’t do it in his house, no man could. All he’d asked of her was to get in beside him, no need to say anything, not even that she was sorry. From the photograph that not long ago he draped with mourning crêpe the faded eyes still twinkle at him, the plump mouth crimped into its winsome pout. ‘Brush Mamma’s hair, dearie,’ a murmur faintly begs. The hair is thick and grey on the pale powdered back, and the blue ribbon is laid out ready on the dressing-table.

‘Hullo, hullo,’ cries the voice in his hall, and then there is the peering through the letter-box. ‘Sir, are you all right?’ Miss Calligary solicitously inquires, and Mr Hilditch stands silent in his hall until the flap of his letter-box clatters back into place and footsteps move away. ‘Come back,’ he whispers then, one hand raised to the Yale latch of the hall door, the other on the key of the double lock. Weeks ago he sought to discover information from this woman that has since shrunk in importance, there now being the more urgent consideration that the girl is still about the place. This woman can lead him to the girl because she knows what the girl looks like and could have seen her around, being always on the streets herself. The girl walked out into that Saturday-night fog, preferring to take chances than to associate with a man whose childhood she knows about through intuition. ‘Come back,’ Mr Hilditch calls out from the steps of his house.

His ponderous form is lit in the open doorway as Miss Calligary and Marcia Tibbitts turn to retrace their steps. The Irish girl, he says: the Irish girl is alive. ‘That girl’s a bit of no good, sir.’ And Miss Calligary adds that such a girl can work a trick with both eyes closed. He doesn’t appear to hear. On his chin and his forehead there is a glistening of sweat. It was they who disturbed the calm, he says, by referring to the Irish girl in the first place. It was they who caused a muddle where there was peace of mind before. Where is the Irish girl now? ‘Sir,’ Miss Calligary interrupts, but he shakes his head and the eyes of Marcia Tibbitts pass from one face to another, excited because something strange is happening here. ‘Tell me the truth,’ the man begs. ‘I am a catering manager. I have lived in this house all my days. I am a respectable man. Hilditch I am called.’ ‘Mr Hilditch, we’re concerned for you. Why not kneel down with us? Why not permit us to ask for guidance?’ ‘Is the Irish girl with you? Has she returned to your house?’ ‘No, no. She’s not with us now. That girl wouldn’t be welcome.’ ‘Where is she then? Where has she gone to? You are out and about, you know what she looks like.’ ‘No one has seen the girl, sir. No one knows.’ Surely, Miss Calligary suggests, the girl is back in her Irish home by now. ‘She has no money.’ ‘A girl like that can always get money.’ ‘Her boyfriend drinks in the Goose and Gander. Out Hinley way, a squaddies’ pub. A stone’s throw from the barracks.’ He visited the place, Mr Hilditch divulges. He sat drinking a mineral in the Goose and Gander. ‘Because you’re teetotal, sir? You drink a mineral because you have put strong drink to one side?’ Mr Hilditch says no. He sat in the Goose and Gander because of a compulsion, which afterwards he realized had to do with the possibility that the Irish girl had noticed an army lorry going by, as sometimes an army lorry does. It had to do with it dawning on her then that her father’s statements concerning her boyfriend’s occupation were well founded. It had to do with her making inquiries and being led into her boyfriend’s company. ‘Mr Hilditch –’ ‘You have driven me to the medical shelves with all your bothering of me.’ ‘You’ve got this wrong, Mr Hilditch. It was never my intention to drive you anywhere. I don’t even know what you mean by that.’ ‘You brought the subject of the girl up. Day and night, you kept mentioning her.’ ‘Mr Hilditch, we mentioned that girl to you in order to compliment you on your charity. We have come to gather you, Mr Hilditch, as we come every day to the houses of other folk. Nothing to do with a dishonest girl.’ Mr Hilditch shakes his head. He shows his finger, where he cut it on a pilchards tin. The blood dripped on to the draining-board, he says, causing him to wonder about it and to wonder about the open flesh. He adds, to Marcia Tibbitts’ greater excitement: ‘You have come to convey me to my coffin.’ ‘No, no, sir. It is the living we gather to us, not the dead. These are morbid thoughts, without the joy that makes all things beautiful. You are not yourself. I have seen that and have said it.’ ‘That girl told me things about herself. She told me how her mother died and how the old woman lived on, and how her father pasted up his scrapbooks. She walked out into the Saturday-night fog in order to take another lift in my car, but for reasons of her own she walked past it.’ He continues to speak. Hilditch his name is, he says again. Joseph Ambrose, called after a newscaster, a cat burglar in his off-time. Felicia the Irish girl is, a name unfamiliar to him, the name of a woman revolutionary. Strange when you think of it, how people are given their names. Strange, how people are allocated a life. Strange, what happens to people, the Irish girl and himself for starters. All he needs is to know where she is now. ‘It would definitely be a help to you, Mr Hilditch, if we showed you the way to the Gathering House so that you could call in at any time. There are kindly folk on hand to bring back to you your peace of mind.’ ‘I can hear her now,’ is Mr Hilditch’s response, delighting Marcia Tibbitts further. ‘Her footsteps on the gravel.’ He walked back into his house that night and the black bar of the fire-grate was on the tiles where she’d dropped it. ‘Mr Hilditch, this girl –’ ‘I took her money to keep her by me, but even so she went away.’ Here is a mad man, Marcia Tibbitts comments to herself, the first she has ever been on a doorstep with. And Miss Calligary, experienced in such matters, recognizes a ring of truth in the last statement that has been made to her, and in less than several seconds she says to herself that this man is not as he seems. From his own mouth has come a confession to leave you gasping. He has stolen a girl’s money for some heinous purpose, causing a girl to be maligned in the thoughts of others. Miss Calligary requests a repetition of the statement, to ensure beyond doubt that it has been as she heard it. Quieter now, the man says he suffers from delusions. He gets things wrong, he says, and then abruptly turns his back.