Malign, unwelcome, the content of what has crept into his recollection causes Mr Hilditch to believe he is suffering from a mental aberration: that he is moving into madness is the only explanation he can offer himself. Every morning he parks his car in the factory car park and crosses the forecourt, greeting the employees who are about, and they return his salutation, unaware. Once in a while there is a dispute in the kitchens, two of the dishwashing women at loggerheads, and he reasons with them as he has always done. He tastes the food, he chats to afternoon callers. A team from Moulinex demonstrates its wares. And beneath the semblance of normality he achieves, scenes lightly flicker, and voices speak.
His days become an ordeal, and on returning each evening to 3 Duke of Wellington Road he faces in private his suspicion that he is being deprived of sanity. He searches through the time that has passed from the moment when his unease began, reliving the first of his worried nights, recalling his effort to shake away the gathering obsession by his visit to the Spa, recalling his presence in the Goose and Gander. Why has he been picked out for attention by a black woman? Why cannot he eat? Why has he written false letters to his employers? Why do delusions now occupy his mind? Mr Hilditch has heard of such developments in other people’s lives, he has read of them in the Daily Telegraph: the normal balance of the mind upset for no good reason. He visits a library, a thing he has never in his life done before. He consults a number of medical books, eventually finding the information he seeks:
Delusional insanity is not preceded by either maniacal or melancholic symptoms, and is not necessarily accompanied by any failure of the reasoning capacity. In the early stage the patient is introspective and uncommunicative, rarely telling his thoughts but brooding and worrying over them in secret. After this stage has lasted for a longer or shorter time the delusions become fixed and are generally of a disagreeable kind.
It isn’t easy to know what to make of that. He sits in his car in the library precinct and while people pass close by, while other cars start and drive away, he tells himself that the fragments of nightmare are nothing more than that. None of this has happened. There was no girl, ever, in his house. There was no tale of a father and two twin brothers, and a bitter woman with a scar on her face. There was never Beth; wishful thinking, the others too. He is Hilditch, a catering manager, liked by the employees.
Safe again in 3 Duke of Wellington Road, a house he has known all his life, where he cried as an infant and played on the stairs with Dinky cars, he attempts to dispel the fantasies that torment him, by whispering the words of ‘You Belong to Me’, accompanying Jo Stafford. But the fantasies nevertheless persist and when the record ends, when his big front room is quiet again, he stands in the middle of it, drained of the energy to assert his will. His lips don’t move, no sound comes from him, yet a voice is speaking, an echo in the room, his own voice telling him that this is real.
One night, when too much has happened in a single day, Mr Hilditch resolves more firmly than before never to leave his house again, to barricade himself within it if need be, for how can he go about his cheery life, with this ugly mockery constantly there? How can he, who has furnished his gaunt rooms to his taste, who is respected and troubles no one, be the protagonist in this darkness that is suddenly lit up, like a film projected in a cinema? From his bathroom looking-glass his face looks back at him, the same face he has always had, but he takes no heart from that. He turns the pages of a photograph album and there is a plump child, with a seaside bucket and spade in a garden, and racing with other children at a school sports. His mother laughs with him, his Uncle Wilf lights a cigarette. Pigeons perch on his outstretched arms, one on his shoulder. First long trousers, his mother’s handwriting records.
In a cupboard there are his Dinky cars, and other toys too: a Meccano set, a Happy Families pack of cards, a gyroscope he could spin on the point of a pin. He throws dice out on a Snakes and Ladders board. ‘The little chap always wins,’ his mother says, and there’s a school report that calls him attentive and neat. The badges that once were sewn into his Wolf Cub jersey are among these small mementoes, one with a brush on it, symbol of house-keeping assistance, another with a rake, for gardening.
‘I’m sorry you’re going,’ he said outside the home-decorating shop when Jakki told him, and later he drove out to the refuse-tip road and past the closed iron gates. A car went by when they were stationary in the lay-by, and he remembered being there before and having to go somewhere else because a car drew in beside them, a couple cuddling. With Bobbi that had been. ‘Well, thanks for everything,’ she had said ten minutes before.
Often, at night or in the daytime, his doorbell rings. The voice calls through the letter-box, offering him assistance through prayer. He listens for the reference to the Irish girl or to the one who dies. That doesn’t come but he knows that such references are cunningly withheld, that they would be there immediately if he opened his door. In the mornings he takes in his milk, checking first from a window that there is no one on his doorstep. After dark he shops from time to time for a few necessities, always careful to ascertain that nobody is waiting at his house when he returns. He answers a letter that comes from his superiors, inquiring if there has been a relapse. He affirms that there has been, but gives no more information. Nothing like that matters now.
One early morning he stands in his shrubbery of laurels and looks down at his feet, at the layers of old leaves that cover the several patches of turned earth. He pokes with a finger: the used-up clay is dusty beneath the obscuring leaves. In the hell that possesses him he sees the laurel roots already creeping among bones half-stripped of their insects’ nourishment, the misshapen roots twisting in the clay. He sees himself: his face, afterwards, in the car, each time crying as uncontrollably as he did the day he caught his leg in the railings, when he was six. ‘Oh naughty, naughty!’ she exclaimed, cross because they were going to be late. Leave him for a moment and he does a thing like that! Two seconds she was gone and now she has to beg assistance of a policeman! ‘Easy does it, son. What goes in must come out, eh?’ And the policeman listened while he told him he’d only done it to see if his knee would fit between the two upright bars. ‘Ever so kind!’ she cried when the policeman was successful, and the policeman said all in the day’s work. ‘Call in for a drink when you’re passing near,’ she invited. ‘3 Duke of Wellington.’
Opening a tin of pilchards, thinking he might fancy them, he cuts his finger. He watches the blood run over the metal, not attending to the small wound at once, only drawing his hand away from the contents of the tin. Drips fall on the edge of the sink and the draining-board. What would analysis reveal about this liquid in which his own bones swim, which fuels his heart and gives him life? Is it different in some essence from the blood of other people? Is the torn flesh different also? He chatted to the young father in the waiting-room of that clinic, as any man might. He walked with others through the stately home; in his friendly way he remarked that it made an outing. He listened while the woman spoke of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and of her sister, who’d been untrustworthy. No one moved away from him when he spoke. That woman liked his cheerful face.
He draws his great weight about his house, restless all day long. A stroke of bad luck, and then another and another. If the girl hadn’t stayed in the nutters’ house he would be going back and forth to his catering department as he has always done, content and occupied with his work. Instead, by chance she went there, allowing a black woman to threaten his privacy, poking and grubbing, flashing her teeth and her jewels, trapping him with her gibberish. A religious has a sixth sense, there have been cases. A religious can disturb you and play on your confusions until you can’t find the subtlety to ask the questions you want to ask and then say too much, your own worst enemy. ‘The little man’s his own worst enemy!’ He remembers that being said, the smile that emphasized the humour of it.
And remembering, he is able for the first time to say it had to be the way it was: there
was no option, no choice. Think of the Irish girl roaming the streets and you can see it at once. Think of her carrying, wherever she goes, what does not belong to her, spreading it about: you know immediately the other had to happen. And if he could find her there would be, once more, merciful oblivion: that’s how things are, he can tell that now. He breaks his resolution not to leave the house and again goes out to look for her. Again, she is not there.
He stares into his mother’s face, blurred and misty in the photograph he decorated with black crepe because he had to say this was his deceased wife. The eyes stare back at him, the features crinkled because his mother simpers lightly, a way she had. ‘Oh, wasn’t it lovely!’ she enthused when they stood in the bus queue after The Wizard of Oz. A Wednesday it was, cold for October. Egg in a cup as soon as they got home; egg in a cup and nice hot chocolate.
‘And how’s that knee?’ the policeman inquired when he called in for the drink she’d pressed on him. ‘All bright and beautiful again?’ And her voice came from upstairs, asking who that was, and he said, calling up to her, the policeman from the other day. ‘Well, isn’t this nice!’ was the comment she made in the dining-room, pouring out drinks, the helmet on the table. She’d put on her high heels before coming downstairs. ‘Cheers!’ the policeman said, and: ‘See you again,’ when he was leaving. And she said yes, why not?
She found the name Ambrose in a novel. ‘Oh, years ago there was a Joseph,’ she said when he asked where that came from. ‘Just a beau.’ Joseph Ambrose Hilditch: he wrote it when they were asked in class to write their names in full one day. ‘Ambrose?’ a boy said afterwards. ‘Sissy, that.’ Ambrose Lafitte, a man who used to read the News, she said. As well as which, he was a cat burglar. The novel was a romance; she delighted in romances. People all over the nation would listen to the six o’clock News, not knowing that within a couple of hours the man reading it would be making his way over the rooftops, all in black. ‘Really caught my fancy,’ she said. ‘Ambrose.’
J. A. Hilditch: that became his signature, practised when he was fourteen, the J looped with the A, the middle of the surname unrecognizable. When he asked who Hilditch was she clammed up. No one much, she said.
The brush salesman spread out his brushes for her, even though she’d called out nothing today when she heard him at the door. ‘He certainly can make you laugh!’ she said about the policeman when he’d been back a few times. And on another occasion: ‘Stop for the night, Uncle Wilf? Blustery outside, it is.’
In the Longridge tunnel it was with a man she’d never laid eyes on until a few minutes before. When the light began to flicker again she was tidying her hair, and the man bent down to pick up his mackintosh from the floor. Afterwards he spoke to her on the platform and she laughed when he’d gone, saying a person wasn’t safe in a railway carriage these days.
Major Hilditch he once wrote down, privately, when no one was around. He never had to think about it if people asked what he intended to do with himself when he grew up. In films there were ATS girls and, still privately, he said to himself that that’s how one day it’ll be: walking with one of them beneath an arch of swords. Manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain; a house in Wiltshire that had been a rectory once, a garden, and a family growing up.
He winds the clocks in his big front room. All the years he has lived with them he has liked to hear them tick, soothing after a tiring day. He cleans the room with his Electrolux, and the hall and stairs, and his bedroom. He mops the vinyl of the bathroom and the lavatory, and scents the air with a herbal fragrance. Such activities momentarily keep his thoughts at bay, but when he rests they are there again.
Had she always foreseen, when he was six and eight and ten, when he sat beside her watching Dumbo, and Bambi, when first he practised his signature, when he wrote down Major Hilditch: had she always known that she would turn to him when there was no one else? When the insurance-man winked and said no time for anything today, did she foresee – already – what would happen in this house? The barman at the Spa said the wife had put her foot down, no more hanky-panky. After a few months the policeman didn’t drop in any more. ‘No, I’d best get back,’ Uncle Wilf whispered on the landing.
Had she foreseen it when he played with his Dinky cars or, before that, when the steps of the stairs were too steep for him, when she took his hand to help him? Had she foreseen it when first she said, ‘Just you and Mamma in their own little nest’? Or was it all different, the spur of the moment when she woke him up to show him the rings on her fingers? His blue-striped pyjamas, a shred of tobacco on her teeth when she smiled down at him, her ginny breath: in his private life, the occasion has always been there, never lost – not for a moment – in the oblivion that kindly claimed the other. Like a tattoo, she said, the lipstick on his shoulder. Her face was different then.
He scours his saucepans. He removes the enamel surround of the electric stove and cleans the metal plates beneath the rings. He defrosts his refrigerator and washes its shelves and containers.
Her powder was scented; it clogged the pores on the two sides of her nose, a shade of apricot. She said she liked the best in the way of powder, and she sat there, afterwards, at the looking-glass, passing the puff over her skin. Lovely skin in its day, she said, and she slipped her eyelashes off, and he could see that in the looking-glass too. ‘Have to dress up for a chap!’ she said. A Saturday it was.
Again there is the ringing of the doorbell, again the attempt to communicate through the letter-box. Protected already by the Yale and the double lock, he has bolted the door as well, at the top and bottom, and has bolted his back door also. He keeps the curtains drawn across his downstairs windows, but not to disguise the fact that he is in the house: his car on the gravel indicates his presence, and after dark there are chinks of light. It’s just that he likes the curtains drawn now. ‘Hullo, hullo,’ the voice of the black woman booms in the hall until it’s drowned by the voice of Rosemary Clooney.
You could see Beth thinking it; you could see her searching her thoughts and finding it. And Elsie Covington, then the others: they broke in somehow. They trespassed on his privacy even though he took them places and lavished a bit on them in their time of need, the Irish girl too. You could tell, from the way she stood there in her nightdress, that she respected neither his house nor himself because she knew. Beth would have passed it on when she had a drink in; Elsie would have, to some man who picked her up. When the Irish girl went he said he didn’t want the light. But the hall was illuminated behind her, and if she came close to him it would be there again in her eyes. It was because he looked away that she ran off, her footsteps on the gravel, not stopping at the car even though he’d made the car ready for her. It had to be the car; he couldn’t do it in his house, no man could. All he’d asked of her was to get in beside him, no need to say anything, not even that she was sorry.
From the photograph that not long ago he draped with mourning crêpe the faded eyes still twinkle at him, the plump mouth crimped into its winsome pout. ‘Brush Mamma’s hair, dearie,’ a murmur faintly begs. The hair is thick and grey on the pale powdered back, and the blue ribbon is laid out ready on the dressing-table.
‘Hullo, hullo,’ cries the voice in his hall, and then there is the peering through the letter-box.
‘Sir, are you all right?’ Miss Calligary solicitously inquires, and Mr Hilditch stands silent in his hall until the flap of his letter-box clatters back into place and footsteps move away.
‘Come back,’ he whispers then, one hand raised to the Yale latch of the hall door, the other on the key of the double lock. Weeks ago he sought to discover information from this woman that has since shrunk in importance, there now being the more urgent consideration that the girl is still about the place. This woman can lead him to the girl because she knows what the girl looks like and could have seen her around, being always on the streets herself. The girl walked out into that Saturday-night fog, preferring to take chances than to associate with a man whose childhood she
knows about through intuition.
‘Come back,’ Mr Hilditch calls out from the steps of his house.
His ponderous form is lit in the open doorway as Miss Calligary and Marcia Tibbitts turn to retrace their steps. The Irish girl, he says: the Irish girl is alive.
‘That girl’s a bit of no good, sir.’ And Miss Calligary adds that such a girl can work a trick with both eyes closed.
He doesn’t appear to hear. On his chin and his forehead there is a glistening of sweat. It was they who disturbed the calm, he says, by referring to the Irish girl in the first place. It was they who caused a muddle where there was peace of mind before. Where is the Irish girl now?
‘Sir,’ Miss Calligary interrupts, but he shakes his head and the eyes of Marcia Tibbitts pass from one face to another, excited because something strange is happening here.