‘No one could put up with Garth,’ one of them declares, eyeing the fingers of shortbread that have been placed on the table. ‘Dire, that man is.’
‘You have knowledge of Garth, of course.’
‘You could say.’
She’s becoming used to the accent, Felicia realizes, listening to further exchanges about this husband. Her carrier bags are close to her chair, where she can see them when she glances down. She has removed from her handbag the banknotes the security man who interrogated her didn’t comment on, keeping only a few back: the bulk of them are stuffed into the arms of a jumper at the bottom of one of the carrier bags, safer there than in a handbag that might attract a thief. Connie Jo put her handbag down in a café in Dublin and when she turned to pick it up there wasn’t a sign of it.
‘You couldn’t live with stuff like that,’ the first woman maintains. ‘I always said it.’
‘Into swapping, the company Garth keeps. They offered her Bob Mather one time.’
‘They never did!’
‘Garth fancies Beryl Mather was at the root of that.’
‘Excuse me,’ Felicia asks the women. ‘Would you know what Thompson Castings is called now?’
They look at her, surprised.
‘What?’ one says.
Felicia repeats the question, and the other woman says there’s Thompson’s in Half Street.
‘The Thompson’s I’m after was taken over two years ago,’ Felicia explains. ‘They make lawn-mowers. The place in Half Street is different.’
The women shake their heads. One of them says she has a Flymo herself.
‘Only a friend of mine works there,’ Felicia explains. ‘I’m trying to find him.’
‘Could be anywhere,’ the woman who has a Flymo points out, reaching for a finger of shortbread.
‘I know.’
When the two women rise to go Felicia asks the waitress who scribbles out their bill, a different waitress from the one who was helpful before. ‘Half Street,’ this waitress says, abrupt and in a hurry, and doesn’t notice when Felicia shakes her head. She asks the couple who occupy the table next to hers, but neither has heard of Thompson Castings, not even in the days before the takeover. She waits for the bustle of the tearoom to calm in the hope that the cashier will be less busy. She’s certain now that Thompson Castings, under its new name, is the place she’s looking for. She has a feeling about it: he lives in one town and works in the other, no reason why he shouldn’t. She even wonders if he didn’t say something like that, but then they talked about so much. ‘Eleven days left,’ he said and on every one of them they met. They walked out to Creagh crossroads in the October sunshine, and held hands in the little crossroads bar attached to Byrne’s grocery. They hurried back through the Mandeville woods because it was a short cut, because he didn’t like to leave his mother for too long since she saw so little of him.
‘Thompson Castings got taken over,’ Felicia tells the cashier when she pays for her tea. ‘Apparently it’s called something else now.’
But this time the cashier looks blankly at her, as if not recalling their previous conversation. ‘Yes,’ she says, and Felicia leaves the chatter of the tearoom and walks about the streets, asking other people.
She sits for a while on a seat, each hand gripping the string of a carrier bag, the strap of her handbag tight on her chest. They had always had to be careful not to cause difficulties with his mother. When they went to the Diamond Coffee Dock he chose a table at the back in case she passed by on the street outside and saw them. That would upset her, he explained: years ago she had been betrayed in love and had been distrustful of love since. Felicia didn’t know his mother to speak to but she sometimes came across her in the shops: a small, tired-looking woman, a widow, Felicia had assumed until he told her that she’d been deserted. A fine white line – a bleached-out scar – ran from beneath her left eye to her jawbone, and this was what you noticed about her most. ‘I understand,’ Felicia said when he explained that there was nothing he’d have enjoyed more than strolling for longer through the Mandeville woods now that the leaves were on the turn, or idling for hour after hour in the little bar at Byrne’s. But of necessity their meetings were often snatched, their coffee hastily drunk. There were glances at his watch even when they were in one another’s arms down at the old gasworks. ‘Will you be back soon again?’ she asked him in the Diamond Coffee Dock on the day of his departure and he said maybe for Christmas. ‘Could I write to you?’ she asked, and he said he’d give her the address, not that he was much of a one for letters himself. He put his hand over hers on the diamond-patterned surface of the table. ‘Every minute I’ll think of you,’ he said, his fingers still pressing hers. ‘Every minute I’ll have you by me.’ He kissed her on the lips, not minding that the woman serving could see, and she asked him what the address was. He began to tell her, but unfortunately Shay Mulroone came in just then. ‘How’re you doing?’ Shay Mulroone said, leaning against the wall in his working clothes. She prayed he would go away, that it would dawn on him they wanted to be alone, but he just went on telling jokes and laughing. ‘Give me a Coke,’ he ordered eventually, and plonked the money down on the counter. ‘No, by the neck,’ he said when the woman began to pour the drink out, and then he took the bottle and moved towards the door, drinking as he went. ‘Cheers,’ he said, and related a tale about a woodpecker that had got into a honeymoon couple’s luggage. ‘God, I creased myself laughing the first time I heard that one!’
A flow of bitterness returns when Felicia remembers Shay Mulroone that day, with his broken nose and funny eye, his voice going on and on, his noisy sniggers. If Shay Mulroone hadn’t entered the Coffee Dock when he did none of this would be occurring now. They would have kept in touch; letters or postcards – anything at all – would have been exchanged; there might even have been a telephone number. ‘Will you write down the address for me?’ she said as soon as they were alone again, but everything was a muddle then because the bus was going in less than twenty minutes. ‘Oh God, look at the time!’ He was on his feet as he spoke and she thought he would write it out there and then, that he’d root in his pockets for a piece of paper and maybe borrow a ballpoint from the woman behind the counter, but instead he became agitated about catching the bus. He’d send her the address, he said, the first thing he did when he arrived. A moment later he was gone and she was left with nothing of him except an empty, sick feeling, as if part of her stomach had been scooped out. She carried her glass coffee mug to a table in the window, thinking that any minute she would disgrace herself by giving way to tears. The address she didn’t have – which she had so tentatively asked for in the first place, not wanting to be pushy – had been snatched from her as a lifeline might be. She hadn’t realized that even his handwriting on some scrap of paper would have been something to treasure, apart from anything else. From the window she could see Doheny’s grocery, where the buses drew in on the other side of the Square. Ten minutes passed and then he was there, with a suitcase, his mother at his side, her arm in his. They passed beneath the statue of the gaitered soldier that stood on the Main Street side of the Square, pausing then for a moment to allow a car to go by before they completed their journey. On the pavement outside Doheny’s they were the only two waiting, and within a minute the bus arrived, slowing to a halt while a fresh nagging began: how could he send her his address since he didn’t know her own? She had never told him, not even the name of the street: on his journey he would realize that but then it would be too late. ‘Bye,’ the woman called from behind the counter when she hurried from the Coffee Dock but she was unable to answer, not even to respond by gesturing. Across the Square the bus began to move and then an elongated red setter – the ensign on its side – passed close to where she stood. For a single instant his face was there also, the dark hair, a hand raised in a farewell salute to the small, greyly dressed woman on the pavement. The back of the bus was so dusty that its red-and-white paintwork was obscured, mist
ed into shades of brown.
‘No,’ a postman says in the town she has come to, pausing in the emptying of a post-box, shaking his head. ‘Not known to me at all.’
She asks in shops. She asks two security guards and a woman at a bus stop. ‘No, you got that wrong, dear,’ a man who is waiting there confidently assures her. ‘No way Thompson’s was took over. Thompson’s went bust two years ago.’
‘Is there anywhere here that makes lawn-mowers?’
The man says definitely not and an hour later, in a police station, her question is repeated. ‘Anywhere on lawn-mowers these days?’ a desk sergeant calls through a hatch. Someone she can’t see makes a suggestion, but someone else says that’s history, packed it in in ’89 they did. ‘I doubt we can help you,’ the desk sergeant informs her, closing the hatch again.
Already he has confirmed that Thompson Castings went bankrupt two years ago, but in spite of this and the response of his colleagues he consults a directory.
‘Nothing here,’ he reports.
A second directory is leafed through, two telephone calls made, before she is assured, with even greater confidence than before, that what she seeks does not locally exist: lawn-mowers are not manufactured in this neighbourhood. Lawn-mowers are sold; there are showrooms, which might also possibly supply spare parts; it’s perhaps something like that she’s after. She is given a list of telephone numbers and spends the next hour in a call-box, not surprised when she is not successful. Storeman in a factory was what he said, definitely a factory.
‘No way we can help you further, love,’ the desk sergeant makes clear when she returns to him. Best to go back to where she came from this morning, he suggests, since that is the town that has been mentioned by her friend.
Overhearing the conversation, a second policeman looks up from his paperwork to agree. Needle in a haystack, Felicia hears one of them saying to the other as she leaves.
6
At five past four, leaving the catering department early, Mr Hilditch drives to the bus station and finds a place in a car park from which he can observe the arrival bays. He is confident she’ll come back; as soon as she draws a blank she’ll return in order to pursue her search in another direction. That stands to reason, but of course it doesn’t preclude the chance that he might have missed her. She might easily have decided that it was all no good after an hour or two of making inquiries. All day he has been jittery on that count; at lunchtime he was in two minds about driving over to Marshring Crescent and hanging about there in the car for a while in case she returned. He drove by Number 19 just now, but naturally you can tell nothing from the outside of a house.
Alert to the buses that come and go, Mr Hilditch presses coins into the pay meter in the car park and waits for a ticket to emerge. Shoppers, laden with their purchases, pass slowly by, young women shouting in frustration at their children, men dour and cross-looking. There is so much of that, Mr Hilditch considers as he makes his way back to his car, so much violence in the world, so much prickliness. Keep your Distance! a sticker rudely orders on the back window of a car. Surfers Do it Standing Up! another informs. I Want Madonna! a T-shirt message asserts. Mr Hilditch finds it all unattractive.
A bus draws in and Mr Hilditch watches the passengers stepping off it: schoolchildren, an elderly couple, road repairers with their snap boxes and empty flasks in grimy canvas satchels. A longhaired man whom Mr Hilditch often sees on the streets is travelling about in search of work, he guesses. Factory workers, men and women, come in a bunch. The Irish girl is not among them.
Hunched in a doorway, he thinks about her. Where looks are concerned, she’s not in the same league as Beth, but then very few girls are. And she certainly doesn’t have Elsie Covington’s spunkiness, Elsie with her shiny little knees cocked out, sitting sideways the way she used to, her lipstick glistening like a cherry. The memory of Elsie Covington inspires an ornately framed image in Mr Hilditch’s recollection, as if a photographer had once been present when she put on her film-star air – Barbara Stanwyck she used to remind him of, not of course that she had ever even heard of Barbara Stanwyck. Beth sits silent within another pretty frame, her long black hair reaching down to the slope of her breasts, her laced black boots ending where her thighs begin. Beth loved black. She used to blacken patches beneath her eyes, and whitely powder her face and neck to make a contrast. In Owen Owen in Coventry they bought a black dress with a lace bodice, the first of the many garments they bought together. All her underclothes were black: she told him that when he asked, the third time they were together it would have been, November 5th 1984, the Happy Eater on the A51, fireworks night, a Monday.
The Irish girl brings it all back, the way a new friend invariably does, stands to reason she should. Memory Lane is always there, always shadowy, even darkened away to nothing until something occurs to turn its lights on. Mr Hilditch likes to think of it like that; he likes to call it Memory Lane, not of course that he’d say it aloud. Certain things you don’t say aloud; and certain things you don’t even say to yourself, best left, best forgotten. Many a time he has lain awake at night and willed the glitter to come – the little floating snapshots of Elsie and Beth and the others: Elsie with her hand raised for attention, Beth in her yellow jersey, Sharon coming out of the Ladies at the Frimley Little Chef, Gaye waiting for him outside the electricity showrooms in Market Drayton, Jakki lighting a cigarette in the car.
The particular buses he’s watching for come once every forty minutes, but he doesn’t mind the wait because the potency of remembering is already running softly through his senses. The manager of an Odeon, in evening dress, flashed a smile at Beth in the foyer once: Leicester that had been, The Return of the Pink Panther. A boy attempted to pick up Elsie in the Southam Restful Tray, grinning from a distance at her, and she gestured across the tables, indicating that she was engaged.
Jakki wanted to go to a church once, the time she had religion, and they went to a Baptist place in Coalville. In a Services on the M6 a boy was familiar with Gaye; no more than five foot that boy was, an ornamental razor blade on one of his ears and a shaved head, chunky, a trouble-maker, smelling of drink. In the Services near Loughborough Beth didn’t speak for the entire meal, not that she was cross, just thoughtful, as any girl has a right to be. ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’: Beth always reminds him of it, the lilting little rhythm somehow suits the memory of her.
Another bus comes in. The Irish girl is on it.
Stepping into the crowd, Felicia searches with her eyes. The buses in the bays, in differently coloured groups, are lined up at an angle, their destinations indicated, their waiting drivers standing about. Latecomers are goaded into a run by the occasional starting of an engine; those already seated are impatient. The Friendly Midland Red, Midland Fox, Chambers’ Coaches, Townabout, are repeated designations.
Felicia wills her friend to step from a recently arrived bus, but he fails to do so; nor does she glimpse him anywhere in the crowd. For the first time she wonders if she should just go home again, and wonders what it would be like, walking into the kitchen to face her father and her brothers. Seeking some indication of her movements, they would by now have discovered the letters she had intended to take away with her but left behind by mistake: long, sprawling letters she had written even though they couldn’t be posted. Every evening, in what seclusion the bedroom offered, while the old woman dozed or pored over another jigsaw, she wrote down what she thought would interest him: how Miss Horish from the tech backed her car into a petrol pump at Aldritt’s garage; how Aidan – under pressure from Connie Jo and Connie Jo’s mother and father – had already given up his trade and was now assisting in McGrattan Street Cycles and Prams; how the Pond’s rep had been footless in the chemist’s; how Cuneen the assistant with the short leg had been sacked from Chawke’s for falsifying. She made a calendar of the days until Christmas because he had mentioned Christmas as a time when, with a bit of luck, he might be back. She crossed each day off as it passed and t
hen, when there were only nineteen left, she found herself writing a letter that was different from any she had written before… It is a trouble but there it is. I was late the first month and then again this one. There is no doubt about it Johnny. I thought maybe being with you like we were might cause it to be late but it is different now. I will be two months gone at Christmas and then we will have to decide what to do Johnny…
That letter – the last she wrote – is with the others, secreted beneath her shell collection in the white chest of drawers beside her bed. On the night she wrote it, still lying awake hours afterwards, she wished that of all her letters she was able to post this one. The composing of the others – making up the sentences while she went about the shops or performed her household tasks – had been a consolation; once written down, the trouble she recorded now – not shared with anyone – acquired an extra dread. As she lay there sleepless after she’d completed the letter, she tried to think of better words than the words she’d used, some softer way of putting it. But all there was was the church bell striking one o’clock, then two and three and four, and the old woman’s watery gurgling, the bedsprings creaking as movement was attempted, the sudden gasp and then the breathing becoming regular again. When she was younger Felicia used to fear that her great-grandmother would die while she slept, that she’d be white and motionless in the morning, dead eyes staring.
Among the waiting buses, the melancholy of that long night returns and Felicia’s spirits are as low as they were then – lower than on the ferry or in the desolate room where the security man interrogated her, or when she woke up on the train and didn’t know where she was, lower than when the policeman said a needle in a haystack. Still searching among the faces around her, she again experiences the sense of punishment she was first aware of the night she wrote the last of her letters: a call to order, a call to account for the happiness she had so recklessly indulged in. ‘Don’t worry about that side of things,’ he had reassured her once, as they hurried through the Mandeville woods. ‘All that’s taken care of by myself.’ Her face went red when he said it, but she was glad he had. ‘There’s nothing wrong in it,’ he murmured, saying more, nothing wrong in it when two people love one another. Yet the night she wrote the letter she felt that maybe, after all, there had been: the old-fashioned sin you had to confess if you went to Confession; the sin of being greedy, the sin of not being patient. And why should she have supposed that the happiness his love had given her was her due, and free?