‘Tell me the truth,’ the man begs. ‘I am a catering manager. I have lived in this house all my days. I am a respectable man. Hilditch I am called.’
‘Mr Hilditch, we’re concerned for you. Why not kneel down with us? Why not permit us to ask for guidance?’
‘Is the Irish girl with you? Has she returned to your house?’
‘No, no. She’s not with us now. That girl wouldn’t be welcome.’
‘Where is she then? Where has she gone to? You are out and about, you know what she looks like.’
‘No one has seen the girl, sir. No one knows.’ Surely, Miss Calligary suggests, the girl is back in her Irish home by now.
‘She has no money.’
‘A girl like that can always get money.’
‘Her boyfriend drinks in the Goose and Gander. Out Hinley way, a squaddies’ pub. A stone’s throw from the barracks.’
He visited the place, Mr Hilditch divulges. He sat drinking a mineral in the Goose and Gander.
‘Because you’re teetotal, sir? You drink a mineral because you have put strong drink to one side?’
Mr Hilditch says no. He sat in the Goose and Gander because of a compulsion, which afterwards he realized had to do with the possibility that the Irish girl had noticed an army lorry going by, as sometimes an army lorry does. It had to do with it dawning on her then that her father’s statements concerning her boyfriend’s occupation were well founded. It had to do with her making inquiries and being led into her boyfriend’s company.
‘Mr Hilditch –’
‘You have driven me to the medical shelves with all your bothering of me.’
‘You’ve got this wrong, Mr Hilditch. It was never my intention to drive you anywhere. I don’t even know what you mean by that.’
‘You brought the subject of the girl up. Day and night, you kept mentioning her.’
‘Mr Hilditch, we mentioned that girl to you in order to compliment you on your charity. We have come to gather you, Mr Hilditch, as we come every day to the houses of other folk. Nothing to do with a dishonest girl.’
Mr Hilditch shakes his head. He shows his finger, where he cut it on a pilchards tin. The blood dripped on to the draining-board, he says, causing him to wonder about it and to wonder about the open flesh. He adds, to Marcia Tibbitts’ greater excitement:
‘You have come to convey me to my coffin.’
‘No, no, sir. It is the living we gather to us, not the dead. These are morbid thoughts, without the joy that makes all things beautiful. You are not yourself. I have seen that and have said it.’
‘That girl told me things about herself. She told me how her mother died and how the old woman lived on, and how her father pasted up his scrapbooks. She walked out into the Saturday-night fog in order to take another lift in my car, but for reasons of her own she walked past it.’
He continues to speak. Hilditch his name is, he says again. Joseph Ambrose, called after a newscaster, a cat burglar in his off-time. Felicia the Irish girl is, a name unfamiliar to him, the name of a woman revolutionary. Strange when you think of it, how people are given their names. Strange, how people are allocated a life. Strange, what happens to people, the Irish girl and himself for starters. All he needs is to know where she is now.
‘It would definitely be a help to you, Mr Hilditch, if we showed you the way to the Gathering House so that you could call in at any time. There are kindly folk on hand to bring back to you your peace of mind.’
‘I can hear her now,’ is Mr Hilditch’s response, delighting Marcia Tibbitts further. ‘Her footsteps on the gravel.’ He walked back into his house that night and the black bar of the fire-grate was on the tiles where she’d dropped it.
‘Mr Hilditch, this girl –’
‘I took her money to keep her by me, but even so she went away.’
Here is a mad man, Marcia Tibbitts comments to herself, the first she has ever been on a doorstep with. And Miss Calligary, experienced in such matters, recognizes a ring of truth in the last statement that has been made to her, and in less than several seconds she says to herself that this man is not as he seems. From his own mouth has come a confession to leave you gasping. He has stolen a girl’s money for some heinous purpose, causing a girl to be maligned in the thoughts of others. Miss Calligary requests a repetition of the statement, to ensure beyond doubt that it has been as she heard it. Quieter now, the man says he suffers from delusions. He gets things wrong, he says, and then abruptly turns his back.
Treachery was the word he used, in private, the day he knew about his Uncle Wilf. Guide and friend, his Uncle Wilf had called himself, and who could have said it wasn’t true? He’d been the source of knowledge about the regimental life, an inspiration in that respect. ‘Always been an army family,’ his Uncle Wilf said, but he was making it up as he went along. Everything fell to bits then: there’d been no army family, nothing like that; it wasn’t to be a guide and a friend that his Uncle Wilf had been coming to the house all these years, it wasn’t to encourage a vocation. Bit on the side, until he didn’t fancy it any more and never came back again. ‘Be nice, dear,’ the ginny rasp whispers again, that special voice.
He bangs his hall door shut as soon as he sees it in the black woman’s eyes. Of course it wasn’t feet and short sight: God knows what talk had got around, God knows what the recruiting officer’s opinion had been. All lies, what the black woman said about not running into the girl again. The black woman knows; that’s why she comes to his door. In her black imagination there is the lipstick tattoo, and the blue ribbon laid out on the dressing-table, and the little-boy hands that always have remained so, clothes falling from a woman’s body, the nakedness beneath. There is that odour of scent, of powder too, in the black woman’s nostrils, and it’s there among the employees, in the canteen and in the kitchens and the painting bays and the offices. There’s the whisper, going on and on, the words there were, his own obedience. ‘Be nice, dear,’ in the special voice, the promise that the request will never be made again, broken every time.
It never was his fault that there was prying later on, after years and years; that there is prying still. Each time he hoped there wouldn’t be. Each time he hoped that a friendship would last for ever, that two people could be of help to one another, that strangers seeing them together would say they belonged like that.
No one passing by in Duke of Wellington Road, no hurrying housewife, or child, or business person, no one who can see Number Three from the top of the buses that ply to and fro on a nearby street, has reason to wonder about this house or its single occupant. No one passing is aware that a catering manager from a factory, well liked and without enemies, is capable of suffering no more.
In the cavernous kitchen of this house Mr Hilditch’s shoes are neatly laced and the laces neatly tied. His socks are chequered below the turn-ups of his trousers. The suit is his usual blue serge, its waistcoat fastened but for the button at the bottom. His shirt is clean, the cufflinks in the cuffs. The tie is the striped one he always wears. His glasses are in place. He shaved himself an hour ago.
The back door is no longer bolted, in fact is slightly open, thoughtfully left so. A light that in the darkness lit the dustbins in the small backyard and glanced over an edge of laurel and mahonia remains unextinguished. In the kitchen there is no sound.
When twilight comes again a scavenging cat, earlier attracted by the open door, returns and this time slinks through it. Black, with a collar that once had a bell attached to it, this cat has long ago strayed from a domestic life too soft to satisfy the instincts of its feline nature. Soundlessly, it tours the kitchen, leaping from time to time on to different surfaces until its survey is complete. Its green, lozenge eyes pass over the crockery of the dresser and the white enamel of the electric stove, over wall cupboards and shelves, the taps above the sink, the wooden chairs, the table on which another chair is overturned, a human body hanging. This is suspended from the single ham hook in the wooden ceiling by a length of el
ectric flex, the head slung forward awkwardly, the mound of flesh beneath the chin wedging the sideways tilt. It isn’t of interest to the scavenging cat. Nothing is of interest except a saucepan on the stove, with a little milk left in it.
24
The convent girls climb up St Joseph’s Hill, hurrying while the bell still tolls. Their conversation is breathless as they turn in at the convent gates, feet running now, faces flushed. Sister Benedict awaits them by the window of a classroom, where other girls are already assembled. A distant figure digs the patch where soon the first of the maincrop potatoes will be planted. Reminded by this figure of the missing girl, Sister Benedict prays.
In Hickey’s Hotel a traveller in office stationery, coughing through cigarette smoke over the remains of a late breakfast, checks his call-book for the day. Above the cycle and pram shop, Connie Jo experiences the morning nausea that her friend, then newly her sister-in-law, experienced five months ago. At Flanagan’s Quarries the lorries are loaded with chippings while the drivers wait beside them, silently smoking. In the Co-op yard Shay Mulroone fork-lifts bales of sheep wire. ‘God, she’s a cracker,’ Small Crowley confides elsewhere; and Carmel, of whom he speaks, mops a floor at the hospital and worries a little about being a cracker perhaps once too often.
The old woman dies on the day before her hundredth birthday. The stiffened body is taken from the bedroom, and the bedroom is empty now. An irony, the general opinion is, being taken at this particular time, but there it is.
One night the boots of the big twin brothers thump into Johnny Lysaght’s stomach and his ribs, and he lies insensible in the dark, by the memorial statue in the Square. Blood oozes from his face, an eye is closed beneath contusions. The cigarettes have not been removed from his attackers’ lips while the punishment was meted out. No word has been spoken. The unconscious youth remains where he has fallen, and the glasses that have been left waiting in Myles Brady’s bar are emptied and then replenished.
The photograph of a girl in a bridesmaid’s dress has long ago been circulated. In one police station or another it has been perused, and details of the disappearance noted. In time, the details and the photograph are filed away.
She will come back, her father believes, guilt assailing him. At Confession he recalls his anger at the time and is forgiven, but feels no forgiveness himself. He makes the bedroom ready for her, arranging her shells on surfaces that are now entirely hers, emptying the drawers of the old woman’s possessions. He dismantles the old woman’s bed and makes room for it in the backyard shed. ‘Have faith,’ the Reverend Mother urges in the convent garden. ‘One day you’ll walk in and she’ll be waiting for you in the kitchen.’ He knows that too, he says; he knows she’ll be there. Hers is the forgiveness that matters. She’ll come back to offer it, that being her simple nature.
Mrs Lysaght shops in Chawke’s for thread, a shade of pale blue. She takes the spools she’s offered to the door, to examine them in the daylight, but is not satisfied and returns them. More will be coming in, she is informed, and she says she’ll come back. The unpleasantness is over now and there’s a satisfaction to be found in that: as she leaves the shop she reminds herself of this, which is something she does many times in the course of a day. He has been taught a lesson by the circumstances that developed; in a sense, even, all that has occurred may have been for the best.
In the kitchens and on the work floor a conclusion is reached. The catering manager, so affectionately part of everyday life for so long, suffered an illness of some mysterious nature: he took his life in the belief that the bewilderment of doctors indicated a grim prognosis. A collection is made in the canteen. A wreath is sent. The funeral is well attended.
Notices outside 3 Duke of Wellington Road announce it is up for sale. ‘A useful property,’ a young estate agent remarks, showing prospective buyers around, adding that an auction will be held, that all the junk will go. Found parked on the gravel in front of the house, the car owned by the deceased has been disposed of already. All there is belongs to the state, there being no inheritor.
‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ a police sergeant retorts when Miss Calligary insists that this same deceased, on his own admission, suffered from delusions. ‘He’d hardly have done it, miss, if he wasn’t in a state.’
‘That man wasn’t what he seemed.’
‘Happen he wasn’t, miss. Happen all sorts of things. But for the record what we have is that the gentleman is no longer with us.’
Miss Calligary mentions the Bible, inquiring if the sergeant ever has cause to consult it. She offers a brochure. For the one who dies there is a paradise earth, she promises, and adds that the deceased displayed an interest when this was pointed out to him, that he invited her young friend and herself into his house so that he could hear more about it. When all the time he was stealing money. ‘The Lord knows where that child is now,’ Miss Calligary adds. ‘We pray for her day and night.’
‘You keep on at it,’ the sergeant breezily advises, and points out that he’s on the busy side this morning.
Other girls set out, on the run from a mess, or just wanting things to be different. Mysteries they’re called when they are noticed on their journey; and in cities, or towns large enough to have a trade in girls, the doors of Rovers and Volkswagens and Toyotas open to take them in.
At Mr Caunce’s house they come and go. They try out the doorways of shops. There’s a first time for everything, they say, settling into this open-air accommodation. Missing persons for a while, they then acquire a new identity. Riff-raff they’re called now.
25
‘Have they closed the breakfast place?’ a man from the cardboard settlement inquires on the street.
Yes, it’s closed, Felicia tells him, and he mutters a cacophony of curses, glaring furiously in the direction of a charity hall that is similar in all respects to the one Felicia was brought to, a long time ago, by Lena and George. She has queued for breakfasts in many since.
‘You have to get there early,’ she tells the man, but he ignores the admonition, continuing to swear to himself. When he ceases it is to ask the time.
She doesn’t know. She sold her watch a while ago, with the cross she used to wear round her neck. She tried to sell her handbag but no one wanted it. It was Tapper who showed her how to dispose of the watch and the cross, to a friend he knew well and trusted. Forty pence she got; fairly good, that, Tapper said. The city she has come to, moving on from other cities and other towns, is no longer strange to her. She knows the way to the river and, as she walks towards it now, what comes into her head is Effie Holahan saying she saw the Virgin, and Carmel saying it was only a dream. Typical Effie, Carmel said, typical not to know the difference. Poor Effie with her dull eyes and her chilblains, and her way of dropping things! ‘Sure, doesn’t everyone have dreams like that?’ Carmel was scornful, and they all laughed, swinging their legs on the convent wall, and Effie Holahan was flustered, red as a sunset. It’s a long way away, that sitting on the convent wall; it’s further by ages than Lena and George; it’s history, as the voice in the police station said that day, which is ages ago also.
Felicia doesn’t beg as she continues on her journey. At this time of day people don’t like being bothered because they’re in a hurry to get to work. She’s not in a hurry herself. The sun comes out, dispersing wispy clouds, warming her face and hair. With a bit of luck, it’ll dry the clothes that got wet last night. Ages ago, too, her first couple of carrier bags disintegrated; after careful examination, in case possibly they were of further use, their remains were thrown away. She has other bags now, five in all because she likes to collect things as she moves about. It’s surprising what people are finished with.
Walking slowly, she nods over that, and what comes into her head is the first time Mr Logan opened his cinema, when he stood on the steps in his suit with the chalk line on it, and his blue bowtie. A masher, her father called Mr Logan, and she didn’t know what it meant until he told her. Cagey, her
father said another time; cagey to gauge the entertainment business the way Mr Logan had, making a success of his dancehall and his cinema, still a bachelor in his fifties. The Woman in Red the film was the night of the gala opening, and Rose said if Mr Logan was looking for a child bride she wouldn’t say no, and the girls on the wall, even Carmel, gasped to hear a thing like that.
You have to move about. You get to know the windows of the shops, the streets in different weather, faces you’re always seeing, the H. Samuel clock, post-office clocks and clock-tower clocks, the parking-meter women, the obstruction of scaffolding on the pavement, red-and-white plastic ribbons to warn you, the street lights coming on. You move about because you want to, the bits and pieces coming into your head. Hail Mary, full of Grace: the first time she repeated it she felt grown up, the beads cold to the touch, smooth in her fingers. Blessed art thou amongst women… The votive light on the stairwall never went out, a red speck in the dark, a tiny glow you could overlook in the daytime because you were used to it. Her father stood for the Soldier’s Song whenever it was played, still as a statue while people shuffled away, particular about that he was. God’s will, he called it, the day her mother died, and her brothers wore black diamonds on their sleeves, sewn in by Mrs Quigly. The sun shone, the day of the funeral; they were back in the house by twelve, before the Angelus. ‘The cross we bear,’ Mrs Quigly said on another day. ‘Every month a reminder.’ Yeah, definitely, Carmel said. ‘Every blooming month.’ And Rose said calmly what’s wrong with an older man if he brings home the bacon?
People collect cartons of coffee from a take-away: office-workers, girls with their make-up fresh and bright, young men in long coats, belts tied at the back. They march along the streets she dawdles in, stepping round her, one man conversing on a telephone he carries with him. A plate-glass window is being replaced, the new glass not yet taken from the clamps on the side of a van. Five workmen stand ready to lift it into place when the timber sheet that covers the damage has been removed. A passing taxi driver greets one of them, shouting a joke.