At half past nine Mr Hilditch ensures that his front door is locked and the back door bolted. He is in bed, and asleep, by five past ten.
During the following several weeks Mr Hilditch goes about his professional tasks with the care and attention for which he is well known at his place of work. At weekends he cleans his house – the hall and the stairs, his dining-room and big front room. He sweeps his backyard and rakes the gravel at the front. He shops in Tesco’s for supplies. He relaxes with his records and the Daily Telegraph.
In idle moments, or in bed at night, he is drawn into the surroundings he so often heard about during the friendship that has ended: the bedroom shared with a woman in her hundredth year, the square with the statue of a soldier, the diamond-patterned table-tops of the café. The father and the twin bachelor brothers are there, the convent friends, the mother of the seducer. In Mr Hilditch’s private life there is nothing new about this excursion into someone else’s background. When Beth went, he found it hard to rid his thoughts of the pimps she had told him about, who had once pursued her; when Gaye went there were the house-breakers she had assisted. There was Sharon’s impetigo when she was a kid, Bobbi’s blind eye. The Irish girl’s name was found by her father, honouring some woman who took part in a revolution: it was in the car he heard that, or in Buddy’s Cafe, hard to be exact.
‘Very tasty, them faggots,’ an employee remarks, as well he might in Mr Hilditch’s view, since under his precise instructions the faggots have been skilfully prepared and cooked.
‘Glad you enjoyed them.’ He smiles his gratitude. Compliments are welcome when a finished association is still raw in his thoughts.
Another employee comments on the marmalade pudding and he gives away a secret: that the suet must be finely chopped, that the marmalade and the beaten eggs must be added to the dry ingredients, not the other way round. He points out that the process and the measurements vary according to whether the pudding is steamed or baked. Since childhood he has preferred it steamed himself.
The women among the employees often request a recipe and invariably choose to approach him rather than a member of the kitchen staff. He likes to oblige them in this way. It pleases him to think of the canteen dishes being served to the employees’ families. ‘Mr Hilditch’s pudding’ or ‘Mr Hilditch’s way of doing it’ might be expressions used. Although he never mentions it, he believes that this may be so.
‘See, we live in a miracle. Look here at this garden. See the fruits of the trees and the peoples of all nations.’
A black woman, bejewelled and painted, proffers a lurid illustration on the cover of a brochure. A young white girl, tidily attired, stands at her side with a sheaf of similar illustrations.
Mr Hilditch, who has been interrupted in the polishing of his shoes at the kitchen table, greets the pair genially, but indicates his lack of enthusiasm for the conversation that threatens by shaking his head.
‘Today we bring you the Word of our Father Lord,’ the black woman continues, ignoring his response. ‘I myself am from Jamaica. This here is Miss Marcia Tibbitts. If my friend and myself could just step inside we wouldn’t take up no more than ten minutes of your day. May I inquire, sir, if you are familiar with the writings of the Bible?’
Mr Hilditch is not particularly familiar with the writings of the Bible. As a child, he was packed off by his mother every Sunday morning to Sunday school. Vaguely he remembers outlandish stories about lambs sacrificed and sons sacrificed, and walking on water. It is all a long time ago and he has never felt the need to reflect on any of it. What Would Jesus Do? an inscription in coloured wools speculated, shown to the Sunday-school class by its teacher. She had turned it into a decoration for her walls, framing the glass that protected it with passe-partout.
‘I’m afraid I’m not interested.’
‘If we could step inside your home my friend would offer you her own experience, how she was gathered in.’
Again Mr Hilditch shakes his head, but does not succeed in halting a tale about being rescued from a video shop, and the promise of the paradise earth in which serpents lie harmlessly coiled and the cobra is a plaything for children.
‘I was lost and have been found,’ the white girl states in a singsong tone. ‘As it is written.’ Then she begins again, about the video shop and the better world of the cobra as a plaything.
‘Look here,’ Mr Hilditch interrupts at last. ‘I’m busy.’
‘We would return,’ the black woman offers. ‘We would come at any hour.’
‘No, no.’
‘Ten minutes of any day is not much sacrifice to make. The Father Lord gives us time eternal.’ The black woman displays a mouthful of healthy teeth and pushes at Mr Hilditch the brochures she carries. ‘There is a future for the one who dies, sir,’ she adds, her tone intimating that the literature on offer reveals further details of this claim.
It is then, while she is still speaking about the one who dies, that Mr Hilditch notices, and is bewildered by, a sudden curiosity breaking in her dark features. Being professionally familiar with the practices of salesmanship and assuming that the toting about of religion can fairly be placed in such a category, he wonders if this is some kind of selling ploy. But to his consternation and alarm, the explanation is not a commercial one.
‘An Irish girl mentioned you, sir. I remember that now as we stand here. A good man, the girl said, a helpmeet to her. Duke of Wellington Road, she said. Big and big-hearted was maybe the description.’
‘I know no Irish people at all.’
‘You helped that girl on her way, not passing by on the other side. Sir, you are at one with our Church.’
‘No, no. I’m sorry. I have to get on. This isn’t my kind of thing.’
‘That girl was chattering, it came up like that.’ Miss Calligary pauses. ‘A confidence trickster, as it turned out after.’
‘I must ask you to go now.’
‘That girl tried to get money from us. Is this the same story for yourself, sir?’
Mr Hilditch closes his hall door with a bang, and leans against it with his eyes closed, remembering how the girl said she’d spent a few days in these people’s house. He goes over the encounter that has just occurred, from the moment when the black woman suddenly realized she was talking to someone she had heard about. Mentioned? ‘An Irish girl mentioned you’: what exactly did that imply? Chattering, the woman said, and then something about a confidence trickster, whatever that meant.
For a moment Mr Hilditch wonders if the whole thing isn’t some kind of error or misunderstanding: by no stretch of the imagination could the Irish girl he has associated with be called a confidence trickster. Others he has known could be described in that way, but it’s the last expression you would use where this recent girl is concerned. And yet clearly it is the same girl: a girl he helped, going out of his way to do so. She said so herself; apparently, she’d repeated it to others.
Slowly, he eases his bulk from where it rests against the hall door and moves across the hall to the kitchen. It’s nothing much, he assures himself, no more than an untidiness, a trailing end; if it seems out of the ordinary it’s only because it has never happened before. A girl he has been good to has never afterwards been mentioned to him by anyone.
‘Right as rain that man was at first,’ Miss Calligary remarks as she and her companion make their way along Duke of Wellington Road. ‘Right as rain and then he goes peculiar.’
It worries Miss Calligary that this has happened. This big, stout man was there for the gathering; she would have sworn it. A solitary man, a lonely man: anyone could tell. He could have got the wrong end of the stick, thinking that the Irish girl was a Gatherer herself and backing off now for that very reason – once bitten, twice shy. Miss Calligary ear-marks a day for their return, requesting Marcia Tibbitts to note the number of the house.
21
For several days, whenever his thoughts are disturbed by the fact that his befriending of the Irish girl is known to a
third party, Mr Hilditch continues to assure himself that this is of no possible significance. By now the West Indian woman has probably forgotten all about it, being more concerned with her paradise. A woman like that, with her brochures and her talk, has enough to fill her day without poking into a privacy.
But, even so, as a little more time goes by, unease begins to agitate Mr Hilditch. He recalls how he sensed, when the Irish girl first accosted him, that the promise of an association was different from the others there had been. In the end it hadn’t been, because the Irish girl had parted from him also; but now it seems as if his intuition might have been right in some other, as yet unrevealed, way.
During a wakeful night he hears the black woman’s voice, informing people that he didn’t pass by on the other side, that the girl sought assistance and he gave it. It’s not impossible that the woman would talk in that way, he reflects, his eyes unfocused in the dark; it’s even likely, since she brought the matter up with him. As that night advances, as the West Indian lilt and all it conveys become more insistent, Mr Hilditch makes an effort to distract his thoughts by directing them elsewhere: to the catering department, to his kitchens, to the bustle of the lunchtime canteen. He wrenches his concentration back to the days when he was still an invoice clerk, to the surprise of being summoned and told to sit down while it was confided that his name had been put forward for the position of catering manager. But although he pleasurably recalls the occasion – the details of training and remuneration pressed upon him before he had even properly said he was interested – he finds himself led by this same stream of thought into an earlier period of his life, when he still had hopes of a military career. ‘Oh, khaki’d suit you!’ His mother’s voice is joky at the Spa where she drank the water and bathed, while he sat waiting or strolled about the town. At the Spa there was a carved frieze: soldiers lying wounded with their shirts off, officers offering succour. The brotherhood that binds the Grave, were the words that formed the accompanying inscription, cut in the stone. At the baths his mother got talking to a woman who suffered from Garrad’s disease and his mother said what’s that? Related to Dupuytren’s Contracture, the woman maintained, though some denied it. The woman’s face was painted, magenta lips, smudges of mascara, powder on a pimpled skin. ‘Listen to this, dear,’ his mother urged. ‘Very interesting, this lady is!’ But he didn’t listen while the woman talked about her ailment, while his mother said fancy that and dearie me. ‘Wouldn’t khaki suit him?’ his mother said in the bar of the Clarence. ‘Going for a soldier, this little man is!’ On the train, returning from the Spa, a man with a beard gave him a threepenny piece. ‘Well, what a surprise!’ his mother said, her neck and face flushed crimson when they’d passed through the Longridge tunnel. ‘Well, I never!’
In spite of this evocation of his private past, when Mr Hilditch’s eyes droop he is again possessed by his speculations about the black woman’s doorstep talk. Then, when he tries to envisage the Irish girl among the pretty portraits that are his memory of the others, for the first time he fails to do so. The day he visited the stately home she was meekly there: now there is nothing, as if the black woman’s talk has robbed him of her.
When the light of morning dawns Mr Hilditch rises, hours before he normally does. He makes tea in his kitchen, and walks slowly about his house, entering one room and then another. When the time comes to cook his breakfast, he finds he isn’t hungry. Later he drives away without food in his stomach.
As more time passes, people notice; Mr Hilditch sees them noticing. In the canteen he picks at fricassee of lamb and Pineapple Surprise; he hardly touches the silverside, and is seen to help himself to a modest portion of his Wednesday favourite. Interviewing applicants for washing-up duties, he has several times to be reminded of names that have already been given to him. His teatime biscuit tin does not require replenishing for more than a fortnight.
Driving home one evening, he runs out of petrol, a misfortune he later relates to his state of mind. He has to walk almost a mile, borrow a tin from a surly pump attendant, and put on a show of being amused at his own folly. Policemen from two squad cars have surrounded his small vehicle when he reaches it again, and retaining this mood of genial self-mockery he apologizes for any inconvenience he may have caused. The policemen are petulant and censorious. When he smiles at them they don’t respond. Useless men, importantly roaring about in their Fords and Vauxhalls, thick as walls. He smiles at them, and watches them driving off.
From the moment she appeared on the forecourt in her red coat and her headscarf, he was generous to her. He listened, he did not once display fatigue. He assisted her with advice; he guided her and protected her, warning her against street criminals and the dangers of hitch-hiking. He gave her as much as he ever gave the others, begrudging her nothing. Did she pass all that on to the black woman? Is all that being said? And what besides? What elaborations added, what curiosity aroused? What titbits of gossip are there by now?
Unsettled as he continues his interrupted journey, he goes over, yet again, all that was said on his doorstep. Later, in his big front room, he reflects how slight, how unimportant, it seemed when the Irish girl said she had been taken in by the people who are calling her a confidence trickster now. He turns the volume of his music up in an effort to stifle his worries and the black woman’s voice, and the whisper of inquisitiveness it feeds. That night he again sleeps fitfully, and has nightmares he can’t remember when he wakes up.
‘Oh yes, there’s been changes,’ the woman using the cash dispenser agrees, arranging four five-pound notes in the wallet of her purse. ‘Can’t say there hasn’t been changes.’
‘No more than eight years of age,’ Mr Hilditch volunteers. ‘Used to come down on the train.’
‘Out of all recognition in that case. No argument on that.’
She is a woman with spectacles, older than Mr Hilditch, with a basket on wheels, grey lisle stockings and a fuzzy grey coat. Her hair is grey and fuzzy also.
‘Thought I’d come back,’ Mr Hilditch continues, not yet inserting his plastic card in the cash dispenser. ‘Lift the spirits, I said to myself, to visit the Spa.’
‘Nothing much of a spa about it these days. They packed that in donkeys ago.’
‘The springs dried up, eh?’
‘Never was no springs, some geezer fixed it. People’d believe anything in them days.’
‘Mother did.’
‘Well, there you go then. No more’n a con.’
‘Mother said it did her good.’
‘There’s a lot that’s in the mind when it comes to a sickness.’
‘There probably is.’
‘It was Len was a great believer in that. All in the mind was the expression he had for it.’
‘Your husband would this be?’
‘Late. 1970.’
Mr Hilditch presses his plastic into the slot and registers his personal identification number, 9165. The woman draws on grey gloves and seizes the handle of her mobile shopping basket. Notes to the value of forty pounds emerge from the wall.
‘A great convenience,’ Mr Hilditch remarks, agreeable to prolonging the encounter. ‘Our flexible friend.’
‘You spend too much’s the only thing. If it wasn’t there you’d be better off.’
‘Fancy a coffee?’
The woman hesitates. She doesn’t reply, but she raises no objection when Mr Hilditch falls into step with her. He couldn’t agree with her more, he declares; cash dispensers induce you to spend too much by making your money so readily available. The banks know what they’re doing, he suggests, and outside a store which he imagines will have a refreshment floor he repeats his invitation.
‘I’m not fussy,’ the woman says, preceding him through swing doors.
It came to him in the early morning that he’d drive over to the Spa, the day being a Saturday. A change was what he needed, an outing to somewhere that belonged to some other time of his life. Two hours it took in the car; longer, with a ch
ange and a wait, it used to be by train.
‘Well, this is nice,’ he remarks with genuine enthusiasm when they are seated. ‘I enjoy a mid-morning cup.’
‘It warms you, this weather.’
This woman is flattered: he can tell that by the way she looks about her to see if they have been noticed by anyone she knows. It was the same on the street. She would enjoy people speculating as to who the stranger is, a good ten years he could give her. He says:
‘I should have commiserated about your husband. Sorry about that.’
‘It’s twenty-two years. You get over it.’
‘Even so I should have said something.’
‘No call for it really.’
‘Even so I’m sorry.’ And since the subject is there, he states that he never married himself.
‘No more’ Vera did. Wouldn’t touch it, according to herself.’
‘A daughter, is this?’
‘A sister as was. We never got on, never saw eye to eye.’
Their coffee arrives. Mr Hilditch feels the first stirrings of appetite for several weeks and asks if there are cheese scones available. ‘I was up at all hours,’ he explains, apologetically, to his companion.
‘She wanted Len is my own belief, and when she couldn’t get him that was that. Wouldn’t touch it once she couldn’t get Len.’
In the course of further conversation Mr Hilditch voluntarily supplies his name, and the information that he is a catering manager. He gives the name of the town where he lives and works, adding that he was born there, population well over a quarter of a million these days and growing all the time. He butters three cheese scones while he is relaying this information, pleasurably watching the butter melt on the warm surface. Not once since he dropped into conversation with the greyly clad woman has he been harassed by the annoyance that keeps him awake at night and confuses him in the daytime.