The wallpaper scrapbooks, Felicia’s father believed, were a monument to the nation and a brave woman’s due, a record of her sacrifice’s worth. In red ink he had made small, neat notes, and stuck them in here and there to establish continuity. Among peeping flowers were the hallowed sentiments of Eamon de Valera:
The Ireland which we have dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit; a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens; whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires men should live.
‘No sign of anything?’ Felicia’s father inquired that Monday evening, referring to her unemployment.
‘No.’
‘I still have Sister Ignatius on red alert.’
The day Slieve Bloom Meats made it clear that the closure was permanent he’d spoken to the Reverend Mother when she had finished her office. Later he’d mentioned the matter to Sister Ignatius.
‘Was there talk of something with Maguire Pigs?’ He made a mush of gravy and potato for the old woman and spooned out ground rice for her.
‘Bookkeeping. Lottie Flynn got it.’
‘The dentist, what’s his name, has a card in Heverin’s for a cleaner part-time.’
She filled the pepper container at the draining board while her father placed a chop and potatoes and a spoonful of greens on each plate, and passed the plates on to the table. He took in the old woman’s tray.
‘In a shocking condition,’ he said when he returned, ‘the brass outside the dentist’s. The same with the doctors’ and solicitors’. Time was those plates would be gleaming to the heavens.’
When she was twelve Felicia had been in love with Declan Fetrick. He was older, already employed on the ready-meats counter of the Centra foodstore. She used to wander about the Centra on her own, pretending to read the labels on the soup tins, picking up jars of shrimp paste and chicken-and-ham, pretending to change her mind as she put them back again. One of the women who came to work there in the afternoons took to eyeing her suspiciously, but she didn’t mind. She never spoke to Declan Fetrick, a scrawny boy who was trying to grow a moustache, and she never told anyone else about how she felt, not even Carmel or Rose or Connie Jo, but every day and every night for nearly a year she thought about him, imagining his arms tightening around her, and the soft bristles of his boy’s moustache.
‘Delaney that dentist’s called,’ her father said. ‘No wonder we couldn’t remember the name, the way you can’t see it, the state the brass is. Wouldn’t the part-time suit you though? Seventy an hour he’s offering. Nine hours a week. When you think of it, wouldn’t it suit you better than the full-time?’
It was what he wanted for her; he was relieved she hadn’t been qualified for the opening at Maguire Pigs. Some little part-time arrangement would get her off the dole and allow her to continue to do the housework, and the cooking for himself and her remaining brothers. A full-time job would mean having to pay Mrs Quigly for looking after the old woman in the middle of the day, as the job at the Slieve Bloom had. He’d worked it out; he had probably discussed it with the nuns.
‘I’d say it would suit you all right. If not the dentist’s then something like it.’
‘I’d rather have the full-time.’
‘It’s what’s going, though, at the heel of the hunt. It’s what’s on offer, girl.’
‘Yes,’ Felicia said, and then the subject was changed, her father repeating what he’d told the old woman: that Sister Antony Ixida was bothering him about tayberries. When the meal was over and the washing-up completed Felicia changed out of her jersey and skirt and put on make-up in the bedroom, beadily observed by the old woman, who was always alert after she’d eaten.
‘You’re going out, girl?’ her father asked, seeing her with her coat on. When she said she was he expressed no further interest. Her mother would have been curious, Felicia thought, from what she could remember of her. Her mother would have guessed that she wouldn’t doll herself up, with earrings and eye-shadow and her coral lipstick, just to meet Carmel and Rose on a Monday evening. Her brothers, on their way out themselves to Myles Brady’s, didn’t even notice that she had her coat on.
‘Hi,’ Johnny Lysaght greeted her in Sheehy’s ten minutes later. ‘You’re looking great.’
She loved his saying that. She wanted him to say it again. She didn’t know a thing about eye make-up, yet he could say straight away when he saw her that she was looking great. ‘Aren’t you the pretty one!’ Dirty Keery used to call out, lying in wait in Devlin’s Lane. But that was different because he said it to all the girls going by, trying to get them to come close to him. And he was blind in any case.
‘Take off your coat,’ Johnny Lysaght invited, and she was glad he did because the shade of red her coat was didn’t match her coral lipstick. Also, it was worn in places. She had put a dress on specially, her blue one with the squares and triangles. ‘What’ll you drink?’ he offered.
‘7-Up.’
‘Drop of gin in it?’
‘Ah no, no.’
‘Keep me company. Cheer you up. Try a vodka and orange instead of that old stuff.’
He had been drinking beer himself. The label on the bottle was festive beside his empty glass. He’d go over to a short, he said, ring the changes. ‘Cheer you up,’ he said again.
‘OK.’
He ordered their drinks from young Sheehy behind the bar. His expression changed a lot when he conversed, vivacious one moment, meditative the next. He referred to her perfume when he returned to their table, saying he liked it. Love in a Mist it was called; she’d put it on when she’d left the kitchen, on the street outside. ‘Cheers,’ he said.
She asked him whereabouts he was in England. She asked if it was London and he said no, north of Birmingham. He mentioned a town but the name was not familiar to her. He was a storeman in a factory, spare parts for lawn-mowers. He lit a cigarette. It kept the wolf from the door, he said; you could do worse.
‘You’re good the way you come back to see your mother.’
‘You only have the one mother.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, sorry.’
She said it was all right. Most people wouldn’t apologize; most people would forget, or remember too late and not know what to say.
‘Is the old lady OK, these days?’
She said she was. In her hundredth year, she said, and he wagged his head in wonderment. He smiled again and she watched him smoking. Marlboro, it said on the packet on the table. In the Coffee Dock and the Two-Screen Ritz Carmel smoked the odd Afton Major. So did Rose.
‘What’s England like?’ she asked.
‘All right. You get used to it. You can get used to anywhere when you’re there a while.’
‘There’s some gets lonely. Patty Maloney came back.’
‘The likes of Patty Maloney would.’
‘I don’t know will things improve here.’
He didn’t know either. She said there had been talk of Bord na Móna opening a factory, to do with compressing peat dust.
‘Stuff people buy for their gardens,’ she explained. ‘My father was on about it.’
‘But they drew their horns in, did they?’
‘They shelved it in the end.’
‘Have another drink?’
‘Ah, no, no.’
He laughed. ‘That orange has vitamins in it.’
‘Just the orange then.’
He laughed again, picking up her glass and his own. She watched him at the bar, easy in his manner with young Sheehy. Carmel and Rose might come in; she wished they would. She wished they’d come over to where she was sitting and she’d say no, the
seat was taken.
‘Is the Dancetime still in business on a Friday?’ he asked when he returned with their drinks.
‘They have the Friday disco all right.’
She knew he was going to ask her, but he didn’t at first. He was looking at her lips and she wondered what kissing would be like. The time of Declan Fetrick she had imagined it. Carmel hadn’t liked it at first, when the fellow with the blackheads from the post office got going in the Two-Screen, when Carmel was thirteen.
‘Would you be on for the disco, d’you think? Friday, Felicia?’
‘I can’t afford a disco these days.’
‘You wouldn’t pay if you were with me.’
She felt confused, in spite of having guessed he was going to invite her. She felt her face reddening and sat back a bit, trying to get out of the light. It was two months since she’d been to the Dancetime Disco, the night the Heart Stoppers came, the night Small Crowley first showed an interest in Carmel, the same night Rose got involved with the failed curate from out in the country somewhere, a man who hadn’t appeared in the Dancetime before and whom Rose hadn’t seen since.
‘It was great running into you, Felicia.’ Under the table one of his knees brushed hers when he moved. ‘I’m glad you weren’t the bride, Felicia.’
Carmel said you never knew why a fellow fancied you, why a fellow picked you out. You could be driven to distraction by fat arms or a flat chest, and then you’d discover that it was that very thing that drew a fellow on. Connie Jo used to say the same. Rose said you could never understand the male mind.
‘It would be great if you came,’ Johnny Lysaght said. ‘Really great.’
He says it in a dream, when Felicia sleeps again. For four hours they danced at the Friday disco, neither of them dancing with anyone else, twice getting a pass and going to Sheehy’s. When he took her hand, walking together through the silent streets at two o’clock in the morning, she wanted to tell him she loved him. She wanted to tell him a boy never kissed her before. In her dream he helps her through the barbed wire and his arms are around her in the field next to the old gasworks, hugging her to him, loving her, he says. There’s the fragrance of his aftershave and he opens a button of his shirt, guiding her hand on to his warm flesh; everything about him is gentle. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he whispers. ‘You’re great, Felicia.’ His lips are moist when he kisses her again, and he closes his eyes when she does, in just the same moment, as if they are one person.
Then her dream is different. Her father says it’s the way the country’s going, brass plates unpolished, a holy show to the world. Her brothers eat without speaking. ‘What’s Lysaght like, though?’ Rose asks, and Carmel giggles.
It is almost seven when Felicia wakes; a faint blur of light filters through flimsy curtains, marking the room’s single window. She watches it intensify, shadows defining themselves as a chair, a table, a clothes cupboard, a wash-basin on a stand in a corner. The curtains are orange and green swirls; dun-coloured walls are scarred where Scotch tape has once adhered, pink paint is chipped. Her father would be on the way back from Heverin’s with the Irish Press, her brothers’ heavy morning footsteps just beginning. In the bedroom she left behind, the jigsaw pieces would be scattered on the bedclothes and on the floor, the few the old woman managed to interlock fallen apart, the jigsaw tray slipped down between the bed and the wall. In a moment there would be the bedpan, her father having to heave the old woman up on his own. The way she always does at this time, she’d feel under the rubber sheet for the clothes-peg bag she keeps her pension money in, and then she’d remember that some of it has been taken, that yesterday there was that unbelievable discovery. In the kitchen the panful of streaky bacon would be spitting on the stove, scattering little specks of fat on to the white enamel, on to the eggs still in their carton, waiting to be fried.
Felicia rises and washes in the corner of the room. She slips out of her nightdress and for a moment is naked, feeling shy to be so, as if she is in the room she shares at home. She dresses quickly, from habit also, then brushes her hair and smears on lipstick. She opens the door softly and finds the lavatory. As she crosses the landing, returning to her room, the sound of a radio comes faintly from downstairs. A few minutes later she descends to the dining-room, where a single place is laid, a plate of cornflakes already waiting.
When the woman with the hatchet face comes in she says something about sleep, and Felicia replies that she slept like a log. ‘Boiled all right for you?’ the woman offers, not waiting for a response. An overall, mainly blue, is wrapped tightly around her. She places a boiled egg in an eggcup beside the cornflakes and a plate of toast, and places a metal teapot on a coiled wire mat. She tells Felicia to help herself to milk and sugar. ‘Call out if you need anything,’ she adds before she leaves the room.
Felicia pours tea, finishes her cornflakes, and slowly spreads butter on a piece of toast. She cracks open the top of her egg. In the kitchen her father would be easing the bacon slices from the pan, slipping a knife under them where they have become stuck. ‘Like this, Felicia,’ he said years ago, showing her. He would cut bread for frying and slice black and white puddings. He likes his eggs turned, her brothers done on one side only.
The landlady appears again, to ask if everything is all right. She mentions the balance of the sum that was agreed, and Felicia pays what is owing.
5
He stops from time to time, drawing in to the curb, allowing her to move almost out of sight before he drives on slowly in pursuit. He knows where she is going since she stated what she intended in their conversation. But of course there could have been a change of heart overnight; he has had experience of that.
In fact, she turns into the bus station, exactly as she said she would, the same red coat, the same two carrier bags. Mr Hilditch watches for a few minutes longer, then drives away.
There are no hills. Against a grey sky, tall bleak chimneys belch out their own hot clouds. Factories seem like fortresses, their towers protecting an ancient realm of iron and wealth. Terracotta everywhere has blackened to the insistent local sheen. The lie of the land is lost beneath a weight of purpose, its natural idiosyncrasy stifled, contours pressed away.
The bus that carries Felicia through all this is almost empty. Women with shopping-bags occupy seats on their own, staring ahead at the driver’s back. A child perpetually cries, ineffectively hushed by its mother. A man mutters as he turns the pages of a newspaper.
As the bus approaches the periphery of the town where Thompson Castings is, the flat roadside fields dwindle, and the factories intensify in number, one rubbing against another. In one of them, Felicia imagines Johnny Lysaght, with spare parts arranged behind him floor to ceiling, in wooden drawers and on shelves. She imagines him in his work clothes, a brown overall, the same brown as the assistants in Multilly’s hardware. He looks for something he has been asked for, and whistles the way he sometimes does. When she visualizes it, Thompson Castings is a place like Queally’s the agricultural-machinery depot on the Roscrea road.
‘Happen it’s out a bit.’ A man in a uniform hazards an opinion at the bus station, lips pursed in irritation because he doesn’t know. ‘Never heard of it, to tell the truth.’
She walks into the town, which has an older look than the town she has travelled from but with the same insignia on banks and stores. Streets amble and twist and turn, petering away to become lanes and alleys, the picturesque preserved as if in protest at the towers and chimneys that mar the town’s approaches. ‘Excuse me,’ Felicia interrupts a man in a wheelchair outside a teashop with small-paned windows that bulge out in a bow. ‘Push me in, dear,’ the man directs. ‘We’ll inquire inside.’
The cashier by the till asks a passing waitress if she knows where Thompson Castings is. The waitress shakes her head, but repeats the query to the people she’s serving. ‘Thompson’s,’ an elderly woman recalls. ‘Used to be in Half Street.’ But someone else says that was Thompson’s the leather people.
>
In a shop that sells electrical goods a briskly mannered man, grey-suited, knows at once: Thompson Castings was taken over by some larger concern two years ago. Another victim of the recession, this man asserts, no doubt about it. You can’t walk a yard without the recession impinging, tales of it everywhere. But when Felicia asks him if he knows what Thompson Castings is called now he says he’s stumped. On the streets again no one knows either.
So Felicia returns to the teashop with the bulging windows and sits over a cup of tea because they were helpful to her there. The tables all around her are full, with housewives and office employees who’ve slipped out for a moment; the waitresses hurry, chivvied by the cashier, who leaves her till from time to time in order to find people seats. The two women at Felicia’s table are talking about a third woman’s unsatisfactory marriage. They are smartly dressed and made up, seeming younger than perhaps they are, fortyish.