‘Hullo, hullo,’ Miss Calligary calls through the letter-box.
The car is still there, exactly as it was. The curtained windows of the house seem the same also.
‘Hullo, hullo,’ Miss Calligary loudly repeats.
Still there is no response.
He roams the streets on foot in case his car is recognized by an employee, doing so at an hour when he trusts he won’t be recognized himself. He goes to places he hasn’t visited for years, to the neighbourhoods the Indians or Pakistanis have taken over. The Boroda Express offers the variety stars of India: Bhangra Garta, Miss Bhavana, Deepa the Voice of Lata. The Koh-I-Noor Restaurant is under new management. The Wool Shop he remembers, stockists of Sirdar Wools and Bairnswear, is the Rupali Boutique now.
He hurries by where shops and cafes have been abandoned and are empty of furniture and fittings, with only a scattering of junk mail left where it has fallen, beneath the low-slung letter-boxes of business premises. He walks through the Foundries, which was a thriving area in his childhood, the only reminder now of its one-time prosperity being the black brick and stone of its purposeless yards and gaunt facades. He walks through suburbs, already leafy, cars parked in car ports, houses sleeping, their windows dark. He passes close to the leisure centre he considers unnecessary, and the cream-tiled Bingo hall that was once an ABC cinema. Without noticing them, he passes churches and a synagogue and a mosque, and one of the two schools he attended, and the old town hospital, Victorian and grand, given over to offices now. In the early morning he watches the Salvation Army hostel from across the road, observing each face as the night’s lodgers emerge.
It is after one of these outings, as he is wearily making his way back to Duke of Wellington Road, that Mr Hilditch finally concludes the girl he has been seeking must have moved on. He nods to himself, cosseting the thought, eager to accept whatever comfort he can pluck out of his gloom. The girl is again in her home town, the back of beyond by the sound of it. Only there will people know, and what interest would they have in a person who is strange to them, several hundred miles away?
In his kitchen that morning he opens a tin of beans and has them with bacon and fresh bread, the Daily Telegraph spread out in front of him while he eats. His euphoria is modest, no more than a change from what there’s been, but he is determined to hold on to it, convincing himself that if the girl were still in the neighbourhood it would surely have dawned on her by now that her father was right about Lysaght being a soldier. She would have found her way to him, which clearly she hasn’t. And if it hadn’t dawned on her, she’d be visible on the streets. Which means that, strictly speaking, the only continuing concern is about what she passed on when she was in the God-botherers’ house.
Mr Hilditch carefully goes over the ground: she stayed in the God-botherers’ house at a time when all there’d been between them was the lift he’d given her the morning they made the journey to that factory and the hospital. Nothing much was said then. And the state of play was similar when she associated with the two derelicts she’d mentioned; not that there is any reason to suppose she’d given the address of Number Three to those people, or said what he looked like. What it amounts to is that less damage has possibly been done than he has persuaded himself to believe.
Washing the dishes he has eaten from, Mr Hilditch considers that he is owed some luck, having lately been deprived of it, and feels that it may have come at last. But as the day advances he loses heart again, and when two or three further days have passed he finds himself back in the slough of uncertainty that has claimed him for so long now. His appetite is not sustained; increasingly, his single desire is to keep himself entirely to his house.
One evening when the bell rings he rises from his armchair after a moment’s hesitation to lift the needle off a record. The only way to set himself at rest is to know what was said. Impelled by the confusions that torment him – the hope that is there one minute and isn’t the next, the reaching out from his despondency in search of some crumb of consolation — he slowly crosses his hall. Releasing one lock and then the other, he tells himself that inquiries can be made without giving anything away. No need for many words on his part. Let the black woman talk, let her trip herself up. Ask a casual question when the moment is ripe.
‘Sir, you have been in our hearts these many weeks,’ the woman at once, and gravely, asserts when he opens his front door, and he sees reflected in her features the thought that here is a man who is greatly changed, whose clothes are not as they have been before. He observes it registering with her that the collar of his shirt does not seem clean, that the dressing-gown he is wearing at seven o’clock in the evening is ragged in places, that at this hour also he is unshaven. The expression of the girl accompanying her, the same girl as on the two previous occasions, remains blank.
‘I have been doing jobs about the house,’ he explains. He essays a smile, wishing to go about his business with these people in what may be taken as a cheerful manner. ‘Fires and that. I like to have a fire.’
His fires are electric now, with a single gas one, but they are not to know that. Once upon a time he laid coal fires, with kindling and newspaper dried in the hot cupboard to get them going. He used to put on old clothes for the task and wear old gloves. Nothing peculiar about any of it, any more than there should be now.
‘Sir, if it don’t bother you, we might step inside?’
Odd the way her grammar occasionally lapses while at other times her speech is fancy, as if she’s preaching at a corner. In his mother’s day when some salesman came to the door she would call out from wherever she was that nothing was required. ‘Tell the lady she’ll save a bundle, sonny,’ a brush salesman said once. ‘For black-lead, for shoes, something for the dustpan. Sweepers, brooms. You name it, sonny. You tell the madam that.’
He holds the door open and the black woman and the white girl step into the hall. He is aware of the difficulties that lie ahead, but the compulsion that possesses him is greater than his natural caution. In his big front room he invites his visitors to sit down.
‘My, my,’ the black woman remarks, looking around her at the billiard table and the gramophone, the two grandfather clocks, the cabinet crammed with paperweights, the knick-knacks on the mantelpiece. ‘My, my,’ the black woman says again.
Mr Hilditch is patient. The Prayer Jubilee has taken place, he hears: the folk who arrived from all over have returned to their homes. It is not the Prayer Jubilee she has come about, the black woman divulges, but to say she can offer an assistance in a time of jumpiness and alarm. She speaks of the paradise earth and outlines in detail the vocation of the Gatherers, their Dedication and their Task. While she does so, Mr Hilditch’s mind races, endeavouring to find some way of making his queries in a well-disguised manner. The girl sits silent, not called upon to comment.
‘Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Would you carry from door to door, sir, the Message we bring you now, that you may know a heart-ease? For it is there in spreading the word of joy for the one who dies.’
Momentarily distracted from his purpose in admitting his visitors, Mr Hilditch retorts sharply:
‘Why do you keep saying that to me?’
‘It is the Message of today and of every day. Strong in faith, and giving glory.’
‘I have done nothing wrong,’ Mr Hilditch hears himself saying, not meaning to say it. He doesn’t know why he says it, or where the protestation has come from. He is frustrated in his thoughts, for when he searches his brain for a neat way to extract the information he needs, no solution occurs. There is no response to an inward pleading that becomes frenzied when the black woman presses more suggestions on him and quotes again from the Scriptures. The girl who accompanies her is still quiet, and while he struggles unsuccessfully Mr Hilditch finds himself distracted by the consideration that he could, at this very moment, be sitting in a Happy Eater with this girl, listening to her tale of woe. He knows she has one; all of them have a tal
e of woe.
‘The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep,’ the black woman is saying now, and what feels like panic spreads in Mr Hilditch. He has made a mistake. He is guilty of an error of judgement. He should not have brought these two into his house: there is no way he can deviously interrogate them. He dare not mention the name of the Irish girl, nor refer to her in some other manner. He should have opened the door and told these people once and for all to clear off.
‘In the future, another Prayer Jubilee will be upon us and you have rooms unoccupied, sir. With the folk who come then, you may go forth in the joy of the Message.’
Mr Hilditch, who did not sit down when his visitors did, says there is no question of lodgers in his house. His voice has lost some power; beneath his clothes the skin of his back has become damp and warm. Beads of sweat form on his cheeks and his forehead; his spectacles have misted. He stumbles over the words he attempts to utter, slurring them.
‘There can be nothing like that.’ His voice comes hoarsely from him now, a whisper he hardly recognizes as his own. He shakes his head. The black woman wants him to pray with her.
‘I’m not interested in this,’ he tries to say and can feel his lower lip shaking. It’s that that makes speech so difficult: every time he tries to get a word out it becomes lost in the shaking of his lip. If he attempts to rouse his anger, he knows he won’t be able to.
‘Parthians and Medes and Elamites,’ the black woman enumerates in a crazy manner, on her knees already. The girl kneels also. ‘And the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea…’
The black woman’s hands are pressed hard together, raised above her bent head. The girl has arranged herself similarly, one of the exposed soles of her shoes in need of repair, her short skirt riding up a bit.
‘We hear them speak in tongues. We hear them, some from their gardens, some from deserts. O, Father Lord, we offer thanks.’
The only girl he took under his roof passed from this selfsame room in her nightdress: of their parting, that is what remains. Then the first of the two buses appears on the drive to the house, and there’s the taste of tuna in the sandwich, the lettuce crunching between his teeth. Listening to the black woman’s prayers, he sees the blue bus again, the passengers stepping out of it, the driver with his newspaper.
‘I’m not interested in this,’ he protests, successfully uttering the words now.
But the black woman continues to speak gibberish, and the girl’s lips move as if she is making a contribution of her own. What life is it, Mr Hilditch wonders, for this child, with her face like a rabbit’s? She’s not a religious, as the black woman is; you can tell that without thinking. All she has done in joining up with these people is to find somewhere to go, a niche to cling on to. She’s running from something; you can tell that too, the giveaway in the eyes. What life will it be for her, to spend the rest of it with nutters, trailing about with brochures and gibberish?
The girl unclasps her hands and rises. The black woman does so too. He leads the way into the hall and opens the front door, anxious now to be rid of these people. He clears his voice with a cough. When he speaks it’s still weak, but the panic that possessed him has subsided a little.
‘Good-night to you.’
‘We understand your trouble, sir. When first we called by I said it to my young friend. We have put two and two together, sir.’
‘What two and two? What d’you mean?’
‘The Irish girl brought pain to our people, sir, as she has to you. I myself am responsible.’
‘What did she say to you?’ The words rush out from Mr Hilditch, careless and unchecked. He meant to shake his head, to say he doesn’t follow. He manages to smile, and to add:
‘I only ask in passing. I don’t know the girl in any way whatsoever. I only met her on the street.’
‘As I did myself, sir.’
‘She asked me the way.’
‘We would have shown her the Way, sir, as tonight we have shown you. You knelt down with us, sir –’
‘I did not kneel down. Please go away from me. That girl was just a girl on the street.’
‘Sir, in your goodness you gave her the money she tried to trick out of the folk in the Gathering House. Put two and two together, you come up with that. Mr Priscatt says it, Agnes too. It’s natural to be jumpy with a stranger that rings your bell. It’s natural when you’re taken on a ride.’
‘I didn’t give her any money. Money doesn’t come into it. She asked me for directions.’
Mr Hilditch is aware that he’s dealing in contradiction, that each denial is more flawed than the last. He is aware that he isn’t making sense. And again he is unable to control what he says.
‘Any girl’s welfare would concern you if she came up to you on the street.’
‘It’s best she has gone, sir. Put that girl out of your mind, sir. The pain will wash away.’
‘I’m not in pain. I don’t know what you mean by pain.’
‘The healing will commence. For that reason we are sent out to gather.’
There is a sickness in Mr Hilditch’s stomach now. Already descending the four steps to the gravel expanse, the black woman turns to ascend them again. Sent by the Father Lord, she says, and suggests that there should be further prayer. She is smiling at him, her black lips drawn back from her crowded, sturdy teeth. For a moment he wants to reach out, to push her away, to watch her lose her balance on the steps and fall to the gravel. But the temptation is resisted, and his tone is calm when he speaks.
‘Do not ever come back here. Keep away from my house.’
He bangs and double-locks the door, and when the bell rings almost at once he ignores it. The letter-box is rattled and the black woman’s voice speaks through it, but he pays no attention. His will has left him, he says to himself in his hall: he admitted them to his house, he invited them in, when all the time they are a mockery of his suffering.
How could she be back in her home town when she has no money? That is the thought he is left with. It has come, as so much else has recently, from nowhere. The Irish girl is roaming the streets, which is why he cannot see her as he sees the others, among his happy memories.
23
In time Mr Hilditch returns to work. It is the best chance he has, he considers, of feeling himself again. He is welcomed in the kitchens and in the canteen and conscientiously devotes himself to the backlog in his small office. But his appetite has not returned, which continues to be something of an embarrassment for a catering manager. He explains it away as best he can, and it is generally remarked that he has not yet fully recovered from the ailment that laid him low for so long.
Then, one afternoon, without warning, an adjustment occurs in his memory. Between the Irish girl’s going upstairs in her nightdress and the blue bus appearing on the drive of the stately home there emerges something else: there is the sound of footsteps on the stairs, of a door closing at the top of the house. In his recall there is his awareness that she knows, that there have been moments, that day and in the evening, when he saw the knowledge in her eyes.
It is on a Tuesday that the remembrance occurs. The last day of March, twenty-five to four. Interrupted in his perusal of last month’s overheads, Mr Hilditch gazes at a calendar that hangs on his office wall and fails to register its familiar details: two children in Victorian dress blowing bubbles, the compliments of Trafalgar Soup Powders plc. The fragment of recall he experiences is more vividly projected than the scene that has been chosen by Trafalgar Soup Powders. He wept when she went upstairs again in her nightdress, already on her way to the beck and call of a father and two brothers, to a stifled life, to guilt on her conscience for ever more. The gramophone needle rasped on the record. The glow of the electric fire was pink on his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers.
‘A tea, Mr Hilditch,’ the tea woman offers. ‘I’ve brought it to you first.’
It is what the tea woman always says. He always gets his tea first, suitable treatment for a cater
ing manager.
‘Thanks very much.’ He tries to smile and wonders if he succeeds.
‘Nice again,’ the tea woman comments, but he does not hear and so does not reply, which causes the tea woman later to remark that the malady that laid Mr Hilditch low has left him on the deaf side.
His eyes drop from their sightless survey of the bubble-blowers on the wall. Print-outs cover the surface of his desk, the cup of tea on its saucer among them. He reaches out and mechanically stirs two lumps of sugar into the warm, milky liquid. On her way back to nothing, he repeated to himself in his big front room, on her way to a bleakness that would wither her innocence: what good was that to anyone? He called to her but she didn’t hear, and then he went upstairs to put it to her that they should go for a drive. All that comes back now.
He plays ‘Blue Hawaii’ again. He makes himself read the Daily Telegraph, cover to cover — foreign news, financial, a column about television programmes he has not seen, the gossip pages. He roasts a four-pound turkey breast, an effort to coax his appetite back.
But what began in his office as a trickle of memory on a Tuesday afternoon becomes a torrent as more days go by. The night the Irish girl was in her nightdress his last task was to burn in his dustbin the garments he’d dotted about the place. The night Elsie Covington said she’d miss him he watched her eating a peach melba and then drove to the car park by the Canal Wharf, deserted on a Monday. ‘You’re planning to take off,’ he said to Sharon and she laughed.
His memory flows destructively, the debris of recall seeming more like splinters from forgotten nightmares than any part of reality. For surely the moment of Gaye’s knowing, too, comes from some nightmare pushed away – her look, the way she glanced at him when she asked if he could spare a twenty just till she got on her feet again? The only one he’d endeavoured to explain to was the Irish girl. Her innocence drew it out of him: how they had called him by different names – Colin, Bill, Terry, Bob, Ken, Peter, Ray, any name that came to hand, they being the kind of girls who liked to use a name. No harm in a different name, any more than there was harm in a man in his position not taking a girl out locally. ‘I’m going south, Bill,’ Beth said, and neither of them spoke for a while, and he went on driving. ‘Where’re we headed?’ Beth asked, and out in the country he turned on to the refuse-tip road and drove on past the closed iron gates. ‘Where are we going, Bill?’ she asked again, her cigarette glowing in the dark. He said a surprise, drawing in to the lay-by where he’d once stopped to have a sandwich and a drink of tea from his Thermos. He had to watch the cigarette. He had to be careful; anything could happen with a lighted cigarette in a car. Afterwards he drove straight back to Number Three, taking her with him because that was best.