William Trevor - Felicia's Journey

PENGUIN BOOKS

FELICIA’S JOURNEY

‘Felicia’s Journey is a masterpiece, one of the finest novels from the contemporary writer I have no doubt at all is simply the best we have … you read and are dazzled by how good it is … It has also one of the most memorable and convincing, most sinister and terrifying of characters created in the modern world, a character of truly Dickensian proportions’ Susan Hill, speaking at the Whitbread Novel Award ceremony

‘A quietly passionate tale saturated in despair … Trevor’s language is spot-on … he is a compassionate, but stern and unforgiving judge’ Geraldine Brennan in the Observer

‘This novel exhibits how emotional and psychological injury horribly incubates more injury … Trevor has never written with more humane energy and baleful bravura than he does in this elegy for unfortunates’ Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times

‘There is always more in William Trevor than a finely crafted story. His uncanny use of detail is piercingly visual … the closing sentence brings from the reader a satisfied sigh’ Brian Masters in the Literary Review

‘Masterly in its tension’ Thomas Kilroy in the Irish Times

‘It is a mark of Trevor’s great imaginative resources that he opens deep chambers of horror without ever describing an act of violence’ Anthony Quinn in the Independent

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Trevor was born in 1928 at Mitchelstown, County Cork, spent his childhood in provincial Ireland, and now lives in Devon. He attended a number of Irish schools and later Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He has written many novels, including The Old Boys (1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize; The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and Fools of Fortune (1983), both winners of the Whitbread Fiction Award; The Silence in the Garden (1988), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Two Lives (1991), which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker-shortlisted novella Reading Turgenev, Felicia’s Journey (1994), which won both the Whitbread and Sunday Express Book of the Year Awards; Death in Summer . (1998); and, most recently, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), which was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Award. A celebrated short-story writer, his most recent collections are After Rain (1996); The Hill Bachelors , which won the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Irish Times Literature Prize; and A Bit on the Side (2004). He is also the editor of The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989). He has written plays for the stage and for radio and television; several of his television plays have been based on his short stories. Most of his books are available in Penguin.

In 1976 William Trevor received the Allied Irish Banks Prize, and in 1977 he was awarded an honorary CBE in recognition of his valuable services to literature. In 1992 he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime’s literary achievement. And in 2002, he was knighted for his services to literature.

Many critics and writers have praised his work: to Hilary Mantel he is ‘one of the contemporary writers I most admire’ and to Carol Shields ‘a worthy chronicler of our times’. In the Spectator Anita Brookner wrote, ‘These novels will endure. And in every beautiful sentence there is not a word out of place’, and John Banville believes William Trevor’s novels to be ‘among the most subtle and sophisticated fiction being written today’.

FELICIA’S JOURNEY

William Trevor

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Viking 1994

Published in Penguin Books 1995

27

Copyright © William Trevor, 1994

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted Lines from ‘Sentimental Journey’ by Bud Green, and Les Brown and Ben Homer, Warner Chappell Music Ltd, London WIY 3FA. Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192888-3

For Jane

1

She keeps being sick. A woman in the washroom says: ‘You’d be better off in the fresh air. Wouldn’t you go up on the deck?’ It’s cold on the deck and the wind hurts her ears. When she has been sick over the rail she feels better and goes downstairs again, to where she was sitting before she went to the washroom. The clothes she picked out for her journey are in two green carrier bags; the money is in her handbag. She had to pay for the carrier bags in Chawke’s, fifty pence each. They have Chawke’s name on them, and a Celtic pattern round the edge. At the bureau de change she has been given English notes for her Irish ones. Not many people are travelling. Shrieking and pretending to lose their balance, schoolchildren keep passing by where she is huddled. A family sits quietly in a corner, all of them with their eyes closed. Two elderly women and a priest are talking about English race-courses. It is the evening ferry; she wasn’t in time for the morning one. ‘That’s Ireland’s Eye,’ one of the children called out not long after the boat drew away from the quayside, and Felicia felt safe then. It seems a year ago since last night, when she crept with the carrier bags from the bedroom she shares with her great-grandmother to the backyard shed, to hide them behind a jumble of old floorboards her father intends to make a cold frame out of. In the morning, while the old woman was still sleeping, she waited in the shed until the light came on in the kitchen, an indication that her father was back from Heverin’s with the Irish Press . Then she slipped out the back way to the Square, twenty-five minutes early for the 7.45 bus. All the time she was nervous in case her father or her brothers appeared, and when the bus started to move she squinted sideways out of the window, a hand held up to her face. She kept telling herself that they couldn’t know about the money yet, that they wouldn’t even have found the note she’d left, but none of that was a help. For a while Felicia sleeps, and then goes to the washroom again.