It wasn’t the recruiting sergeant with that woman. ‘Wishful thinking, dear,’ his mother used to say. Easy to get something wrong when you want to, she did it on occasion herself. ‘Well, you know that, dearie,’ she reminded him, in a twinkling mood, all dressed up, the fox’s head of her fur upside down, the fragrance of her lavender water.
They were just some couple; a vague resemblance there had been and in an emotional state he had let his imagination run away with him. ‘Wishful Wally,’ she used to say, and laugh to show she was only being a tease.
The whine of the needle on the no man’s land of the record has begun. Mr Hilditch listens to it, not moving from his chair, the ornate electric fire casting pink shadows on his trousers. Of all his rooms this is his favourite, the crimson wallpaper and set against it the soft green baize of the billiard table it took four men to carry in. The sofa and the well-stuffed armchairs, the cabinet of paperweights, the mantelpiece ornaments and the portraits of other people’s ancestors, the two grandfather clocks: all are at peace with one another and have a meaning for him.
But for once the room’s tranquillity fails to influence the torrent Mr Hilditch’s emotions have become, and after some minutes he crosses to the gramophone and lifts the needle from the record. It is dangerous for the Irish girl to go. He said it and she didn’t listen; he said it clearly, he even repeated it. She’s going back to less than nothing. He doesn’t understand why she can’t see that.
Beth couldn’t see it, either, when he put it to her that it was foolish to move south. Nor could Sharon when she said she had to go; nor Bobbi come to that, nor Gaye, nor Elsie Covington, nor Jakki. Mr Hilditch closes his eyes. A confusion oppresses him, blurring what he is trying to say to himself. This present one came up to him at his place of work, he didn’t make an approach. She let him drive her all over the place, mile after mile; she permitted him to wait on her hand and foot, no better than a servant. She made no payment for petrol or oil, nor for food consumed away from the house, nor in the house itself, nor for the cost of heating and light, soap and toilet paper. Why had she sat like that? Why had she leaned forward and then leaned back again? Why had she come down in the first place, indecent in that nightdress? He knows the answer. He doesn’t want to hear it, but it’s there anyway: she doesn’t care how she appears to him because she sees him in a certain light. She has guessed, as Beth guessed, the first of the others to do so. When Beth announced out of the blue that she was going south, everything she’d guessed was there in her eyes. It was there in all their eyes in the end. They were his friends and he was good to them. Then there was the other.
Tears flow from Mr Hilditch, becoming rivulets in the flesh of his cheeks and his chin, dripping on to his neck, damping his shirt and his waistcoat. His sobbing becomes a moaning in the room, a sound as from an animal suffering beyond endurance, distraught and piteous.
19
‘No, write it out,’ Sister Francis Xavier insists. ‘Fifty times till you know it.’
The minute the bell goes all the voices begin at once, and there’s the noise of the chairs scraping, and footsteps running, and Sister Francis saying running’s not allowed. The voices dwindle, floating back up St Joseph’s Hill, until there is silence except for the ticking of the wall clock and a door closing. The maps are still hanging on the blackboard. They should have been put away, the physical and the political they’re called: mountains and rivers, the counties all different colours. Through the window, her father is in the garden, tying up Michaelmas daisies. He doesn’t see her looking at him; he doesn’t know she has been kept in. Is maith liom, she writes, and then the coffin is by the dug grave. Her mother is going into that hole, but Father Kilgallen says to heaven. Peace, Father Kilgallen says, and clay makes a clatter on the yellow wood. Father Kilgallen raises his hand for the blessing, and Carmel is the bridesmaid then. ‘Who’s that?’ Johnny asks, and someone says a nightclub singer. The singer has long black hair and bangles and earrings, high heels that shine, black like her hair. She smiles when she sings, a white flash in her face, the sunshine of Spain she calls it. ‘Where’s Johnny?’ Carmel asks, and Aidan says he came into McGrattan Street Cycles and Prams to buy a pram for the baby, but when she goes there she can’t find him. She looks for him by the old gasworks, but he isn’t there either. She calls out to him because it’s dark. He doesn’t come into the fish restaurant, he isn’t in Mr Caunce’s house. ‘Johnny!’ she calls out, going up in the hotel lift with the children, and the children make a singsong of his name. ‘You’re wanted, Johnny! You’re wanted!’ Connie Jo is laughing, drinking wine with Mr Logan. Rose says it’s a queer thing, Johnny going ahead on the honeymoon. ‘Take my hand,’ the Spanish woman sings. ‘Take my whole life too…’
He’s not in the Spud-U-Like when she climbs in through the window. He’s not in his mother’s kitchen. She opens all the doors in Mr Caunce’s house, where there are people lying down in the rooms, but he isn’t there either. The lavatory water drips down through the ceiling and the Spanish woman is crouched shivering on a bed, her scarlet dress thrown on to the floor. It’s what you’d expect, Miss Furey says, anyone called Johnny would cause you grief; terrible work, anyone called Johnny could get up to. ‘My God, that’s an awful sound to come out of any human being!’ Sister Benedict cries when she hears the Spanish woman’s weeping.
He isn’t in Sheehy’s or in the Mandeville woods. He isn’t in the canning factory. She asks in Chawke’s and the Centra foodstore and Scaddan’s. She asks in the convent, but the weeping of the Spanish woman is so loud she can’t hear what anyone says to her. The crying of the Spanish woman is a weight that crushes her, pressing her down. ‘It’s there in your eyes,’ someone else says, sitting on her bed, a heaviness pulling back the bedclothes so that it’s cold. There is the sound of breathing, a catching sound, as though snagged with each emission.
‘What you’re thinking is there, Felicia.’
She tries to wake up, to wrench herself out of her dreaming. But she can’t wake up.
‘Don’t put the light on.’ The breathing becomes deeper, an urgent throatiness only inches from her face. The voice is a whisper. ‘It ruins everything, Felicia. Everything is destroyed.’
She opens her eyes. No light comes from the window, no hazy dawn filters through the curtains. His presence on her bed causes a depression that draws her own body towards him.
He talks about other girls, naming each of them, describing them. No one ever knew except those girls, he says; they knew because of the closeness of the association. All he ever wanted to do was to sit with them; he spent a fortune on them, presents, meals, driving them wherever they wanted to go. Beth, and Elsie Covington. Sharon, Gaye, Bobbi and Jakki. It is a private thing that they have been his friends.
‘I’m telling you so’s you understand, Felicia. I never told another soul. We could have continued the association, you could have stayed in my house. No other girl ever came into my house. There was never that.’
It isn’t in any way like a dream now. She says she’s sorry if she did anything wrong. Because he mentions staying in his house, she says she didn’t mean to intrude.
‘You came downstairs in your nightdress.’
‘I only came down to ask you to lend me the money. Nothing only that.’
‘I took chances every hour you were here, dear. Every day I thought someone would find out. You occupied a bed. You used the lavatory and the bathroom. God knows what shadows on the glass.’
‘No one saw me. I did everything you said.’
‘It was enough what we had, Felicia. Just sitting and talking in the places we went to, you telling me all those things. But when I looked in the driving-mirror it was in your eyes too.’
‘What was? Could I put the light on? I don’t follow what you mean.’
‘When you know a thing like that it isn’t easy for any girl to pretend.’
The nervousness she felt at the bus station when he first offered to give her a lift is t
here again. She was nervous when she looked around the next morning and realized his wife was not in the back of the car. She hadn’t thought twice about it when he explained that unexpectedly his wife had had to go into hospital but now, suddenly, without having to think, she knows he never had a wife.
‘I pushed it away when I saw your eyes in the driving-mirror. I didn’t want to accept it. But then you came downstairs.’
‘I’m sorry if I upset you. I didn’t mean to upset you. I don’t understand what you’re saying to me.’
‘No one’s blaming you, dear. Things happen. Things take a turn.’
A hand is placed on one of hers. It’s only a pity, he says, that everything is ruined. No, don’t put on the light, he says; he doesn’t want the light.
‘Leave me alone, please.’
‘They said they were going and I asked them why, but I didn’t have to, Felicia. You understand that, dear? You appreciate what I’m saying to you?’
‘I’ll go away. I won’t bother you. It doesn’t matter about the money.’
‘I was the world to them. In their time of need they counted on me.’
She knows the girls are dead. There is something that states it in the room, in the hoarse breathing, in the sweat that for a moment touches the side of her face, in the way he talks. The dark is oppressive with their deaths, cloying, threatening to turn odorous.
‘I’ll drive you away from my house.’ His whisper comes again, and she senses the blubbery mouth close to her. ‘Dress yourself and we’ll drive away. I have money to give you for the journey. Just walk out of the house and get into the car.’
She knows she must not do that. As surely as she knows about the girls, she is aware that she must not be drawn into the humpbacked car. He has waited for night to come and to settle: the dark is what he chooses, and the car.
‘Yes,’ she agrees. ‘Yes, I’ll dress myself.’
The floorboards creak as he lumbers his way to the door. She hears the rattle of the door handle, but no light shows when the door is opened, no silhouette appears. She hears him on the stairs, still in darkness, his footsteps heavily descending.
Unable to move, petrified by fear of what may happen next, more frightened than she has been in his presence, she lies where he has left her, doubting that she will find the strength to leave the bed. But in time she does, and shakily feels her way across the room. Softly, she opens the door, to grope for a key on its other side. There is none. She feels a run of blood on her legs, then turns the light on and uses part of a sheet to wipe it away. Her hands and arms are trembling, which makes all movement difficult.
She sits on the edge of the bed, looking round the room, her eye finally caught by a broken piece of fire-grate. Soot and specks of masonry have dropped on to the red crêpe paper that has been bundled into the grate; the broken bar has become dislodged and lies on the hearth. It blackens her hand and is too short to be effective in her protection, but at least it’s something. She dresses and drags her coat on. From far below, outside, she hears his footsteps on the gravel. She pulls back an edge of the curtain, but it’s still too dark to see him. The car door bangs softly, and she knows he’s waiting in it now.
Cautiously she steps out on to the landing, still gripping the bar of the grate, her two carrier bags slung from the crook of her free arm, her handbag looped about her body. She descends the unlit stairway, pausing every two or three steps to listen in case he has returned to the house. The metal bar makes a clatter on the tiles of the hall when it slips from her fingers. In a panic because she can’t find the latch of the hall door, she feels for a light switch.
20
As he often does on a Sunday, Mr Hilditch visits a stately home. Arriving early, more than an hour before he will be able to gain admission, he parks his car in the empty car park, spreads his mackintosh coat on the grass beneath an oak tree and eats the sandwiches he has made: tuna and egg, with lettuce, tomato and spring onions.
The car park is a level expanse that has been cut into a hillside; from his position under the tree, he can see most of the long, tarred drive that winds through parkland, and the house itself, a sprawl of red brick and stone, with turrets and chimneys, and walled gardens. Swards of crocuses bloom close to where he picnics. The bark of the tree is jagged on his back.
He watches a blue bus turning in at the distant entrance gates, and coming closer on the drive. It disappears for a moment below the edge of the hill; the sound of its engine reaches him before it comes into sight again. Creeping into the car park, it reverses, moves forward, repeats these manoeuvres before finally positioning itself. A chatter of voices begins as its passengers step out; a girl in a blue uniform makes an announcement, saying that everyone should be outside the gift shop at half past four. The passengers disperse, descending by different paths to the house. Left alone, the driver lights a cigarette and spreads a newspaper out on a rustic table.
Cars appear on the drive, and eventually turn into the car park also. A second bus – yellow and grey – arrives, disgorging further visitors to the house. Mr Hilditch watches them stretching themselves and setting off in pairs or groups. Then, having finished his sandwiches, he unwraps a KitKat before making his way in the same direction.
He feels as he always does when a friendship has come to an end: empty, some part of him deflated. Already the Irish girl has joined the others in his Memory Lane: her round, wide-eyed face stares back at him when he thinks of her, the image as luminously alive as that of Beth or Elsie Covington. He always plans an outing as soon after a parting as is possible, in an effort to combat the lowness of his spirits. The day after Gaye went he came to this selfsame stately home.
In the gardens that are spread out around the house Mr Hilditch lingers while shrubs and flowerbeds are examined by the other Sunday visitors, the winter buds identified. He keeps with the crowd; he is not in a hurry. ‘Nice, this time of year,’ he remarks to two women, sisters they seem like. ‘Nature lying low, eh?’ The women are amused by that, and smile. At a turnstile that leads into a cobbled stable-yard the charge for adults is a pound. Mr Hilditch pays, and passes with the others into the kitchen quarters of the house, where antique cooking utensils are laid out to offer a flavour of the past. Pantries and sculleries have been scrubbed clean and are empty except for vast copper jelly moulds and domes of fly-proof mesh.
‘Fascinating, eh?’ Mr Hilditch remarks to a couple who are admiring a device that turns butter back into cream. His enthusiasm is genuine, since professionally he finds much to interest him.
Upstairs, in a high square hall with pillars, and in a dining-room and other reception rooms, life-size models of footmen stand in stately idleness. Petrified housemaids dust volumes in a library, or polish the surfaces of ornate tables. A family that occupied the house is recalled from another age also, in conversation or performing on musical instruments, or dancing; a girl brushing another girl’s hair; a solitary figure reading on a window-seat. Tasselled red ropes separate each display from the living observers who now file whispering by. In the scented bedrooms there are scenes of discreet undressing, hipbaths ready.
As the hours pass, the tranquillity of the house and its landscape continues to please Mr Hilditch. In the cafe next to the gift shop he is served by girls wearing flowery dresses that reach down to their shoes, but it is too soon yet even to wonder if any one of them would appreciate the warmth of friendship: today there is no need for that.
‘Makes an outing,’ he remarks in an easy way to the people he shares a table with. ‘Fills a Sunday, eh?’
The people politely agree that it does, then continue with the conversation his comment has interrupted. When they rise to go, Mr Hilditch smiles and says goodbye.
The last to leave the cafe, he purchases, as he pays, some of the cakes and scones that are left over. The two buses and most of the cars have driven off by the time he reaches the car park.
As he eases himself behind the steering wheel, he sees again the girl he las
t befriended and with that image drives slowly through the dwindling twilight. When he arrives in Duke of Wellington Road, darkness has long ago preceded him and for a few moments he sits in his car after he has drawn it up on the gravel, not wishing to open the front door and step into the hall until he has gathered a little strength that may be of assistance in the silence of the house. In time he finds it, and mounts the four steps to his hall door.
Later that same evening, depositing garbage in his dustbin, Mr Hilditch is aware of a faint aroma of burning cloth when he lifts the dustbin lid. He passes no private comment upon this, nor is his curiosity stirred: not even remaining as a smudge in his recollection is his burning, the night before, of various women’s garments and accessories, having started the blaze in his dustbin with the day’s newspaper and half a cupful of paraffin. Nor does he in any way recall that he returned his mother’s shoes to the outside shed where they had gathered mildew before recently he found a use for them. Nor that he picked up a bar of a fire-grate from the tiles in his hall and threw it into the shrubberies.
It is usual, when a friendship finishes, for Mr Hilditch to suffer in this manner. He is mistily aware that something may be missing and attributes the aberration in his memory to the intensity of his loss – the moment of each departure having been so painful that an unconscious part of him has erased the surrounding details. At first, when Beth went, this concerned him, and he endeavoured to find his way back to the moment and all that accompanied it. He was not successful, and has since accepted the lapses he has experienced as offerings of mercy, private even from himself, best not questioned.
This evening, after he has eaten, he sits in his big front room, indulging in the day he has spent: the crocuses in bloom, the passengers stepping out of the blue bus, the copper jelly moulds, the girl brushing her friend’s hair. He derives consolation from these unexacting recollections, one succeeding another, then fading away before returning, the images stark and soundless. He does not, this Sunday evening, play music on his gramophone; his mood is not for music, as it never is when a friendship has ended. It will be a day or two before music is heard again in 3 Duke of Wellington Road, Tuesday probably, or Wednesday.