‘A lot come over for it.’
‘Of course they do.’
A new excitement possesses Mr Hilditch. He remembers Sharon saying she was beyond the limit, twenty-nine or thirty weeks gone, the time the dry cleaner took her to the Gishford. It always has to be private, he remembers she said, if there’s anything dodgy. Sheffield’s easily far enough away.
‘The only thing is,’ he says, ‘I think I’m right in stating that if there’s any irregularity you can be going back and forth to a local surgery till the cows come home. Anyone who hasn’t paid the health contributions. Anyone who’s an alien. You could be hanging about for weeks.’
‘What?’
She hasn’t been listening. He half closes his eyes, seeing himself with her in the Gishford, as Sharon has described it. He sees them in a waiting-room, a clear implication established by his presence beside her. Carried away for a moment, Mr Hilditch breathes heavily, then calms himself.
‘You cut the red tape if you go private, is what I’m saying to you.’
‘I don’t know what to do without a chance to talk to Johnny.’ It’s Johnny’s baby, too: she repeats that twice, her voice raised. She repeats that she doesn’t know what to do.
The images in Mr Hilditch’s imagination recede. The emotion his passing reference to her condition has engendered alarms him. People are noticing now all right, but the pleasure of that is tinged with the fear that he has been clumsy, that again she is slipping away. When she quietens he says:
‘It’s only that Ada mentioned it before she went, but you’re right; it’s best left for now. We won’t refer to it again. I’m sorry about the Irish boys not being in tonight. The trouble is they’re never more than passing trade. A spot of trouble one night and they find somewhere else. Sorry about that, dear.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
He hopes she’ll continue, but she doesn’t.
‘You’re downcast, dear?’
‘A bit.’
‘You’re looking chipper, as a matter of fact. If it’s any consolation.’
She doesn’t reply.
‘I’ll get the girl in the office to make her inquiries first thing in the morning, and then we’ll see where we are. How’s that look?’
‘She won’t find him.’
‘If anyone can find your friend that girl can. I promise you that, Felicia.’
When the fish bar closes they move on, and only call in once more, at a Little Chef that surprisingly is still open. Later they stop in the lay-by they stopped in before.
‘I hope it’s not uncomfy.’ He doesn’t know if his solicitude reaches her through the rug he has suggested she should drape over her face when she has crouched down in the back again. He has recommended the rug because of the street lights. ‘It’s great the way you understand about that,’ he adds, again endeavouring to induce cheerfulness.
When the car comes to a halt on the gravel outside Number Three he repeats that the girl in the office will get cracking first thing. She’ll ring round every possibility she can lay her hands on; she’ll get through to the personnel departments at the different works the way a private inquirer wouldn’t be able to; she’ll give the name John Lysaght, with a detailed description. As he said when he first mentioned the matter, she’ll check out the electoral register and any other listings she can find.
‘By eveningtime we’ll know the score. We’ll have Master Johnny in our sights.’
‘Will I come back to find out from you?’ From the way she says it – the tiredness in her voice – she is clearly already convinced, in spite of everything he has just said, that he won’t have news for her. What’s on her mind is the money she came to borrow.
‘Any time after dark. Maybe about six?’ He raises a hand to his mouth to stifle a yawn that does not develop. Then, as casually as he can manage: ‘You’ll find somewhere for tonight, will you?’
‘I’ll try for that house again. Mr Caunce’s.’
‘Take care in a place like that, Felicia.’
‘Yes, I will.’
Her carrier bags are in the hall, where she left them by the hallstand. He watches her endeavouring to find the words to raise the matter of the money, but she’s too shy to return to the subject. It’s natural enough, since touching a total stranger for anything up to fifty pounds is a delicate undertaking. He wonders about mentioning the money himself, just to keep her interested, but decides against that.
‘All right in the toilet department before you set off?’ he inquires instead, casually also.
‘Yes, all right, thanks.’
She still hesitates. She begins to say something, but only manages a word or two before she interrupts herself and says good-night. Less casually now, his intonation furred with concern, he wonders if she’s wise to go wandering about at this hour of the night?
‘You’re welcome, of course,’ he offers next, ‘to lay your head down here.’
14
‘Morning, Mr Hilditch!’ a man with a bad leg calls out on the forecourt, one of the canteen cleaners.
‘Morning, Jimmy. Better spot of weather, eh?’
‘Does your heart good, Mr Hilditch.’
The drizzly weather of the last day or two has passed on; it’s frosty now, with a clear sky. Rissoles in batter it is today, or pork roast or fish; prunes and custard or roly-poly: the Thursday menu. He’ll probably go for the rissoles, with french fries and mushy peas, unless the roast tastes special, which once in a while it does.
‘Morning, Mr Hilditch,’ someone else calls out from a distance, and he smiles and waves.
It seems extraordinary that he is greeted as he usually is. It seems extraordinary that no one looks differently at him on the forecourt, or in the kitchens when he enters them ten minutes later, or through the glass of the offices adjacent to his own. Mr Hilditch finds it hard to believe that none of these people is aware that less than eight hours ago, at twenty past one in the morning, standing in his own hallway, he issued the invitation he did and as a consequence has an unknown Irish girl under his roof. All your adult life you live to a rule. Every waking minute you take full precautions on account of wagging tongues. Then, in a single instant, you let it all go. Not once did he experience an urge to take Beth or Elsie Covington, or any of the others, under his roof. Never before has he made reference to a wife, or spoken of a wedding with regimental traditions, and swords. There has never been a call for anything more than the meetings, the hours spent together, and people noticing where it was safe for people to notice.
Last night in that Little Chef a woman collecting used dishes definitely muttered something to another woman, and both of them looked across to where the Irish girl was shaking her head after he’d drawn her attention to a young man who’d just entered the place. Clearly the two women had established that she was pregnant. It still hardly shows, but women can tell the way a man isn’t able to, as he knows from what is sometimes passed on to him in the canteen. He even put it to her; something about a woman’s perception, making conversation.
Shivering through him, akin to the fever that accompanies a bout of flu, the excitement that began as a tick of pleasure in the Blue Light fish bar became intense when later he stood with the Irish girl in the hallway, her carrier bags waiting for her to pick up, the little metal cross just visible at her neck. He invited her under his roof because he was impelled to do so, just as he’d been impelled to take Gaye’s arm as they were leaving Pam’s Pantry at the Creech Wood Services – a premature action because it was the first time they’d gone out together. Yet he couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d tried, even though Creech Wood wasn’t far enough away, not by a good twenty miles. Two minutes later, in the car park, he noticed a man who looked like Bellis from the spraying sheds, and tightness knotted in his stomach, a warmth becoming icy. ‘Your daughter, Mr Hilditch?’ he imagined the man saying the next time they met in the canteen; and having to shake his head, saying he’d never been at Creech Wood Services in his li
fe. But to his vast relief he was mistaken: the man was someone else.
To be seen by the wrong pair of eyes when you’d linked arms with a friend seems a little thing now; tiny compared with it being known that you’ve taken a girl under your roof. For the first time in his adult life the sensation of risk feels attractive, and instinctively he is aware that this is because the risk he has taken is so great. It seems to Mr Hilditch, also, that he has been journeying for a long time to the destination he has reached, that all his previous actions have lacked the panache of the one that has brought him here. The Irish girl spent the night in his big front room, saying she’d be all right there, although he offered her a room with a bed in it upstairs. She lay down on the sofa, where he saw her when he tiptoed downstairs before he retired himself. As he recollects her shadowy, sleeping form now, Mr Hilditch knows that that sofa will never be the same for him again. Already this girl has used the forks and spoons he uses himself, and used the toilet and maybe has had a stríp wash. ‘Make yourself an egg or two,’ he said before he left, ‘if you’re peckish later on, Felicia.’ She is welcome to all he has.
The morning passes slowly for Mr Hilditch, a difficult time to concentrate. He knows he can trust this girl. He knows she will stay in the house, not venturing to the shrubberies or the backyard because he has said it’s best she shouldn’t. She will be careful at the windows, keeping well back although they’re only partially visible from the road; in particular she will keep clear of the downstairs windows in case some deliverer of junk mail chances to glance in.
Yet even so, naturally, he is nervous. It would be agreeable to draw things out, to drive off this evening in another direction, to sit down again with her in the kitchen for a late-night snack after they’ve visited a few more cafés. But he can tell she’s not in the mood any more for drawing things out; she has given up and she’s beginning to be edgy. Again Mr Hilditch sees himself in the waiting-room of the Gishford Clinic, murmuring to her that she mustn’t worry. There has never been anything like that either, nothing even approaching it.
‘Keeping fit, Mr Hilditch?’ is a query at lunchtime in the canteen.
‘Fine, thanks. Yourself?’
Some reply is made; Mr Hilditch hides his lack of interest beneath a smile. Surely the Asian woman dishing out mushy peas can tell he’s not as he was yesterday? How can there fail to be something in his expression reflecting the frisson of unease that caused him to remain awake all night just because she was under his roof, only a flight of stairs separating them? ‘Oh, what a timid one you are!’ his mother used to say when he was six. He smiles again, pleased that the remark has come back to him. He thanks the Asian woman and picks up his tray, not feeling timid in the least.
She’ll maybe be turning the pages of a Geographic now. She’s different from the others, nothing tough about her. Simple as a bird, which you’d expect her to be of course, coming from where she does. And yet, of course, they’re all the same. The truth stares out at them and they avert their eyes. Beth, with her extra glass or two, couldn’t tolerate it for an instant; Elsie had made herself immune to it by the time she hit the streets. The more lies they are told the more they tell them to themselves – Jakki about her so-called company director, Sharon up the garden path with the dry cleaner, father of five. The first time he met up with Bobbi she had a black eye: from walking into a door edge, she said.
‘What would I go for, Mr Hilditch?’ an employee whose name he can’t recollect wants to know, and he advises the pork because of the crackling. ‘Happen I will, Mr Hilditch. Looks champion, that pork, eh?’
She’s maybe having her boiled eggs now. She maybe put on ‘Lazy River’ in the big front room and the melody comes softly to the kitchen. Curiosity has drawn her upstairs, to the dresses hanging in the wardrobe, and the shoes on the linoleum beside it.
‘Third extractor’s clogged, Mr Hilditch,’ someone reports later that afternoon, and he can hardly tell if it’s a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter anyway, some shadow in an overall such as they all wear, some covering on the head by European law.
‘Dearie me,’ he responds, as he always does in a calamity. He watches while a crowd gathers round the faulty extractor, Len from the finishing shed who’s always called in for this kind of repair, and most of the kitchen staff.
‘I think you’ll find us competitive,’ the Crosse and Blackwell’s rep contends later still, in the office. ‘Grossed up, I’d say those terms are out of competition’s reach.’
It’s not of interest; it doesn’t matter. A clogged extractor or bargain prices, how can any of it compare with a runaway from the Irish boglands passing through the rooms of his house, a girl with a cross on a cheap metal chain? ‘Excuse me a minute,’ he apologizes to the Crosse and Blackwell’s man, and telephones the Gishford Clinic from the staff call-box outside the canteen. ‘Yes, we can arrange an immediate,’ a soothing voice assures him. Very civil, the place sounds, as Sharon said.
‘You give us a shout,’ the Crosse and Blackwell’s man invites when he returns to the office. ‘Any time you’ve thought it over.’
‘Yes, I will.’
He shakes hands with the Crosse and Blackwell’s man, trying to remember his name.
‘Always good to see you, Mr Hilditch.’
‘And yourself.’
Pregnant in his house, examining his mother’s likeness draped in mourning on the dining-room mantelpiece, going from room to room upstairs, eventually at her strip wash. Mr Hilditch drops the lids over his eyes in the hope that the images will intensify. He turns his head away, taking off his spectacles for a moment to disguise his concentration on a private matter, while the Crosse and Blackwell’s man fastens his briefcase.
‘I’ll leave another card,’ the man says, placing the card on the edge of Mr Hilditch’s desk. ‘Just a reminder.’
Her clothes draped over the chair and the towel-rail in the bathroom: not since his mother was alive has there been anything like that in Number Three.
In the vast kitchen the remains of the tea Felicia made an hour ago is cold. Her head softly aches, muddled with the worries that have occupied it all day. Somehow or other, she’ll pay back the money she took from the old woman and no longer possesses. She’ll settle for part-time cleaning, an hour a day, anything there is. And whatever she is lent for her journey home she’ll pay back by borrowing from Carmel, or from Aidan and Connie Jo, even Sister Benedict; she’ll get it somehow. When Johnny comes – maybe for St Patrick’s Day or Easter – he’ll help her when she explains. When Johnny comes they’ll disentangle his mother’s distortions and she’ll tell him every single thing, what she had in mind when she rode out to see Miss Furey, how in a final bout of desperation she sought the advice of the two women who had distributed leaflets at the canning factory when the rumour began that it was going to close. There was help at hand for any woman in difficulties, the leaflets promised, and someone had pasted one on to the door of the outside lavatory, which was still stuck there when she went to look, the telephone number underlined. ‘You come on over,’ a voice invited when she dialled it, and gave an address in a town twenty miles away.
After she has washed up her cup and saucer and the teapot, Felicia sits in the big front room, remembering that cold afternoon. Her carrier bags are beside the sofa, where she left them when she lay down last night. Sans Souci, the bungalow the women lived in was called, pebble-dashed in a shade of pink, on a small estate. The women wore chunky knitwear and glasses, and called her ‘love’, telling her not to worry. They gave her coffee in a mug, and she didn’t like to say it didn’t agree with her at present. A child came into the room when she was talking about her troubles, and was told to go away. The women sat on the floor, drinking mugs of coffee themselves. ‘He’s liable,’ the one whose glasses had darker rims than her friend’s pointed out. ‘He can’t run away from it.’
But she said it wasn’t like that, and began at the beginning: how she and Johnny had fallen in love, how he had don
e his best to protect both of them against what had occurred, but something had gone wrong. She felt shy, saying that. She felt ashamed of having to tell strangers, and became flustered in the middle of it. ‘Are you saying the man doesn’t know?’ the other woman asked, so she explained about Johnny leaving in a hurry, how between them they had failed to make arrangements to keep in touch. ‘Before you do anything,’ the same woman laid down, ‘you have to get hold of the father. You have clear rights in that respect. You have a father waltzing off like he’s a prince or something. That man was liable from the moment he abused you.’
She protested again it wasn’t like that, but the woman insisted that was the way you had to see it. It was abuse if a man couldn’t give a toss, if he was gratifying himself with girls all over the shop. Wherever he was now, an order could be obtained from the courts; as soon as the child was born, maintenance could be withheld from the father’s wages. Figures were quoted: the number of women, nationally, recorded as having being left in this manner. The callousness of it was touched upon, the monstrous selfishness of it. ‘Give us the offender’s name,’ the woman with the darker rims urged, reaching across the floor for a piece of paper on which the child had been drawing with a crayon. ‘Full name and address in Ireland if you can’t supply the present whereabouts.’
In the big front room Felicia remembers shaking her head, and soon after that she left. At the hall door of the bungalow the women told her that they were single parents themselves, each with a child. One-parent families were accepted these days, they both assured her; there were some who chose it. They offered to help her in the matter of the court order; fifty per cent of the time they were successful in cases where there were orders.