Felicia's Journey

  ‘Johnny and myself love one another.’ The words came tonelessly, when several minutes had passed. She didn’t cease to polish the brass while she spoke. ‘There’s no one can do anything about that.’

  There was no reply. Had she still been employed she might have brought up with one of the women at Slieve Bloom Meats the plight she found herself in, a plight that could not be mentioned in the kitchen. She remembered the women’s lowered tones when they spoke of such a predicament, or joked about it. She could have said she had a friend who was in trouble; anything like that would have done. Instead she had still told no one that punctually every day, at eleven o’clock in the morning, nausea afflicted her. Not Carmel nor Rose nor Connie Jo, nor Sister Benedict, who always listened to your troubles; naturally not her brothers. The very thought of confiding in someone she knew well made her feel nervous all over, prickles on her skin.

  But while waiting that evening for her father to launch into further condemnation of Johnny Lysaght, and perhaps because the women at the canning factory had come into her thoughts, she remembered Miss Furey. ‘You’re no more than a child, Felicia,’ her father commented eventually, on his feet and already going from the kitchen. He hesitated by the door, as if about to say something else, and just then her brothers returned from Myles Brady’s and sat down at the table to eat slices of a pan loaf and spreadable cheese, which every night at this time they did. Her father closed the door behind him.

  Would she have been able to confide in her mother? Would she have confessed and said that an error had occurred, that there was no doubt? Would her mother have gone silent, and been unable to disguise her disappointment, have even cried for a while, but then have known what to do? Would she have cried herself, and been comforted in the end?

  She pushes her way into a public house, the Pride of Lions, still pondering that. It’s crowded and noisy: drinkers are flushed with laughter and good humour; the barmaids hurry with glasses. The surface of the bar is marble, brown flecked with green and grey. There are shaded lamps on the walls between dark-framed mirrors, and green velvet on the banquettes that stretch beneath them. Glass-topped tables have ornamental metal clasps at the corners. On one of them, beside her, a lipstick-stained cigarette is smouldering in an ashtray. At the bar a man is demonstrating a mechanical chimpanzee in a tartan dress.

  No one notices her, standing there with her bags. Music is playing, the air is smoky. There are football colours, red and white; a gang of youths. ‘Here we go! Here we go!’ their song begins, and a voice calls out that singing’s not permitted, not tonight or any other night. A black girl leans against the bar, her head thrown back in amusement. Felicia stays a moment longer, making certain: he isn’t there.

  Cold on the street again, she picks up the thread of thought this conviviality has interrupted. There is no way she can know if she would have confessed to her mother. Her mother is too far away now, too shadowy and lost, little remaining of her besides that last glimpse of her features, and the memory of running to keep up with Father Kilgallen in the Square, and her father being there when the moment came, and the old woman saying she has outlived another one. ‘Excuse me, miss,’ a bearded face begs. ‘Bit of loose change at all?’

  Strange to think it was Miss Furey she confessed to, or as good as confessed to: a stranger who once a fortnight sold duck eggs and turkey eggs in the shops. Middle-aged, unmarried, a woman to whom no man had been known to pay attentions, yet about whom there had once been a rumour that she was pregnant. When abruptly her condition changed and she returned to normal it was said with certainty that no child existed in the farmhouse where she lived.

  Felicia drops a coin on to the proffered palm. The man looks at it, not thanking her, not saying anything. Guiltily, she adds a second coin, still thinking about Miss Furey. She hadn’t hesitated when she remembered the story that had got about: the night after her father brought up the subject of her love affair she rode out to Miss Furey’s farmhouse, a frosty night, the moon almost full. Dogs barked as she approached the yard. Miss Furey herself opened the back door.

  ‘I’m sorry to come like this,’ Felicia said, and gave her name. ‘Could I ask you something, Miss Furey?’

  Miss Furey was a big-shouldered woman, with large and protrudent teeth. Her nose was large also, heavy about the nostrils. These were her dominant features. Her hair, cut short, was sandy.

  ‘Are you lost?’ she asked in reply to Felicia’s query.

  ‘No, no, it’s not that. I think maybe you could help me.’

  ‘Come in.’

  She held the door back and Felicia walked straight into a big, cluttered kitchen. Miss Furey’s brother, heavily made also, was seated in an armchair by a Rayburn cooker, watching television. Cats slept at his feet. The dogs that had barked were sheepdogs, one of them diseased, something the matter with the skin of its head, around its eyes. Four dogs in all there were, and as many cats.

  ‘I don’t know do I know you?’ Miss Furey’s bewilderment, mingled with the curiosity of a woman who did not have many visitors, had not abated.

  ‘No, you don’t. I hope you don’t mind me coming out.’

  ‘Why’d I mind?’

  There were unwashed dishes on a table in the centre of the kitchen, and saucepans and a frying pan piled up in the sink. All the surfaces – windowsills, shelves, table-tops – were untidy. Two pairs of Wellington boots stood by a door that was half open at the far end of the kitchen. Coats hung on hooks; there were sacred pictures, and a calendar. Dishes of food for the cats littered the soiled linoleum on the floor.

  ‘We paid that tax thing,’ Miss Furey’s brother said. He didn’t take his eyes from the television screen. His clothes were ragged, as Miss Furey’s were, cardigans and jumpers with holes in them. Both of them wore trousers.

  ‘Sit down at the table,’ Miss Furey invited, and Felicia could feel her curiosity getting the better of her suspicion. She wanted to hear; already there was an eagerness about her. It was the News on the television.

  ‘I have a cheek coming here,’ Felicia said.

  ‘Well, you’re here now. Don’t mind him,’ Miss Furey added, for Felicia had glanced in the direction of the man in the armchair. ‘He’s deaf on the left side.’

  Felicia let it all tumble out. She wanted to close her eyes while she did so in order not to have to see the woman’s reactions, in order not to have to pay attention to them when Miss Furey took offence. At the time it had been said that Miss Furey had travelled to Dublin to consult a chemist who performed operations. The women at Slieve Bloom Meats said her brother was the father. One of them contradicted the theory that a Dublin chemist had been involved, claiming that the infant had been got rid of more crudely and been buried on the Fureys’ land.

  ‘God above us!’ Miss Furey exclaimed. ‘What are you telling me this for?’

  ‘I remember years ago –’

  ‘That’s a slander you’re about to say. Don’t say it.’

  Miss Furey kept her voice down, even though it was thick with emotion. Deaf on the left side or not, the man hunched in the armchair had sharply turned his head when she exclaimed.

  ‘Could you help me, Miss Furey?’

  ‘People will say anything. Any lies that will come to their lips. Go home now.’

  Miss Furey rose. In her tattered garments she hastened to the door that led to the yard, the four sheepdogs roused by her movement.

  ‘Take care I wouldn’t go to the Guards,’ she threatened. ‘Get off our property now.’

  Riding back, Felicia wept and the oozing of her tears became a flow that blinded her. When finally they ceased she dismounted in order to wipe away the traces from her cheeks and to blow her nose. ‘Please, God,’ she prayed. ‘Please, God, help me.’

  But no help came. Instead, on her return, her father pursued his harangue. ‘Now, listen to me, girl,’ he began the moment he saw her, a hardness distinguishing his features and his tone as he advanced on to the territory that mattered to
him most, territory on which he was unable to believe he could ever be wrong, on which his own expertise was unassailable. Her face tingling with cold, the rims of her eyes raw from her tears and the chill night air, Felicia listened.

  ‘You will not live in this house and keep company with a member of the occupying forces. This family knows where it stands, and always has done. Your great-grandfather and his patriot companions journeyed from this small community to the cockpit of war, and perished in their valiant efforts. For eight centuries, not an hour less, the Irish people have known only the suppression of language, religion and human freedom. A vision was born on the streets of Dublin seventy-five years ago during those Easter days. It was not fulfilled, the potential has not been realized: you have only to look around you. On top of that the jackboot of the British bully is still in six of our counties; there is still the spectre of death and torture on the streets of towns as humble as our own. No child of mine will ever be on that side of things, girl.’

  Felicia said nothing, and for a moment closed her eyes. What was being said about soldiers was pathetically irrelevant.

  ‘This fellow’ll be back, girl, but associate with him and you’ll leave this house. That’s said and it needn’t be said again.’ Her father paused, then went on less harshly. ‘You’re at the beginning of things, girl. One of these days there’ll be work for you to go out to again. I heard yesterday a farmers’ co-op might be set up, with every item stocked that a farmer would want – gum boots, pig-wire, roofing felt, all that type of article and more. Within a six month there could be as many employed as there used be in the canning, maybe twice the number. When you’re a child you take advice, girl. That’s what I’m saying to you now. I’ve said it and we can leave it.’

  Felicia did not acknowledge this either. She remembered, years ago, when she was too young to understand, her father playfully drawing her attention to a little Union Jack that was the trade mark on the bonnet of Miss Gwynn’s old Wolseley car. She had been holding his hand, out for a walk with him on a Sunday morning. ‘A good thing the Wolseley went out of business,’ her father had remarked with humorous satisfaction, and at the time it had seemed a natural thing to say. Yet now, just because someone worked in England, just because he had an English accent, he had to be condemned, and lies made up about him.

  ‘I’ll say one last thing to you, girl: look no further than that brave old woman who sleeps across the room from you. Not much older than yourself she was when the lads went off, knowing the colour of their duty. Three days later and she’s a widow. She wasn’t married a month and he was gone. Don’t talk to me of some back-street romance, girl.’

  He nodded in his emphatic manner, still lost in the fervour that inspired his statements. Then he rose and left the kitchen, as he had the evening before. But when she was cooking the breakfast the next morning he suddenly said:

  ‘Has Lysaght got you pregnant?’

  She didn’t pretend otherwise. There was no point in pretending anything. No point in telling a downright lie now that the word was there between them.

  ‘We’re both responsible,’ she said.

  ‘How long are you gone?’

  ‘I’ve missed a few times.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘There’s no doubt about it.’

  He crossed himself. He called her a hooer, looking at her over the smoke from the frying pan, not raising his voice. He said he was glad her mother wasn’t alive. No better than a dirty hooer, he furiously repeated.

  ‘I feel sick in the mornings,’ she said.

  By ten o’clock Mr Hilditch has read everything in the Daily Telegraph: the foreign news, the financial news, the sports news, the home news. He has no interest in sport, but usually finds himself acquiring information about sporting matters because he finds the knowledge useful in conversation. A high court judge, he has learned, is in some trouble after revelations made by a youth; a woman has been found, still living, in the locked boot of a Ford Escort; the dogs of New Age travellers have ravaged a herd of sheep; a woman has decapitated her husband. Such detail engenders a mild gloom in Mr Hilditch and he rouses himself to place a record on the turntable of the old, wind-up gramophone he bought at an auction the week Number Three became his own. ‘I Got it Bad and That Ain’t Good’ cheers him considerably, and pleasurably he speculates on what tomorrow holds for him.

  8

  The little hump-backed car is waiting at the end of Marshring Crescent even though Felicia is early. Its windows are misted up, but one of them is wound down as she approaches. The fat man smiles at her. He whispers, as if anxious not to disturb the sleep of the people in the nearby houses. He tells her to get in at the other door, remaining in the car himself.

  It isn’t yet fully light. As she settles her bags at her feet, she feels it is wrong that she should be sitting in the front and the man’s wife in the back. But she doesn’t say so because the engine has already been started. The car is actually moving before she realizes that the back seats are empty.

  ‘Your wife,’ she begins, suddenly alarmed.

  ‘I had to take Ada in last night. No warning whatsoever, they rang up to say the little op was put forward to ten this morning. I had to drive Ada over so’s they could prepare her.’

  Bewildered and still uneasy, Felicia says she hopes he isn’t making this second journey on her account.

  ‘Ada’ll need me when she comes through. I have to be at the bedside. Digs all right, are they?’ His voice is squeaky. She hasn’t noticed before. He isn’t a man you can be alarmed about for long.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The house you’re in? OK, is it?’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. I wouldn’t like to think I’d misled you about Marshring.’

  The huge shoulders beside her are motionless as he drives. Hands, ungloved and pale, seem disproportionately slight on the steering wheel. There’s hardly any traffic about. A joy to drive in the early morning, he remarks, and adds:

  ‘First time I met up with you I could see you were in an upset.’

  ‘It’s just that I’ve come a long way.’

  ‘And then again you’re in a country that’s strange to you.’

  ‘Yes, I am.’ She explains how at first she found it hard to understand what people were saying to her, but that this is getting better the more she listens.

  ‘I hope I didn’t offend in that respect.’ An unexpected gurgle of laughter startles her. Two small eyes gleam humorously behind the thick spectacles. Pouches of flesh blur the features that are turned in her direction, teeth smile evenly. He smells of soap, a pleasant early-morning freshness that reassures her. The cuffs of his shirt are crisp and clean.

  ‘Soon as you spot your friend you’ll be tickety-boo. Soon as you know the state of play.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you your name?’

  She tells him; he doesn’t tell her his. ‘I never heard that one,’ he says instead. ‘Felicity we have over here.’

  ‘My father found Felicia. Some woman he’d heard of.’

  A woman who’d manned the barricades in 1916, who’d met her death there. There is a newspaper cutting about this person in her father’s albums, a photograph of a hard-faced woman in military uniform.

  ‘It’s nice,’ he says, ignoring the information about the revolutionary woman. ‘Felicia has a ring to it.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘I was never in your country, Felicia. Though I had a relative who used to talk about it. Beautiful country, I understand.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘You work at something, Felicia?’

  ‘I had work in a canning factory. It closed a while back.’

  ‘The unemployment’s terrible. Strictly speaking, you’re un-employed then?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘And have you other family, Felicia? Father and mother still with us?’

  ‘My father is. So’s my gre
at-grandmother. I have three brothers, two of them twins.’

  ‘Great-grandmother? She’d be an age, eh?’

  ‘She’s nearly a hundred.’

  ‘Well, I never!’

  The landscape they are driving through has become familiar to Felicia: the well-used fields, grass drenched in a greyish fuzz, furnace chimneys breaking the flat monotony, the brick of factories.

  ‘That old lady would remember the Boer War.’

  Felicia doesn’t know when the Boer War was, but she nods none the less. Once she would have known, at least for the length of one of Sister Francis Xavier’s history classes, but then she’d have forgotten because she had no interest. Her great-grandmother wouldn’t have been interested in a foreign war either.

  ‘Two relatives went down to the Boers,’ her companion divulges. ‘I’m from a military family.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’ve had a regimental career myself. The army’s in my blood, as you might say.’

  ‘You’re not in the army now?’

  ‘I came out when Ada was first ailing. She needed care, more care than I could give, having regimental duties. No, I still help the regiment out, but it’s office stuff now.’

  ‘At the factory where I met you –’

  ‘Oh, no, no. No, not at all. I happened to call in there to see a friend. Well, as a matter of fact, to tell him Ada was going into hospital. People like to know a thing like that. No, I keep things straight for the regiment on the bookkeeping side now. Gets me out of the house, Ada says.’

  Again Felicia nods.

  ‘You’d stagnate if you didn’t, Felicia. You’d stagnate in a big house, caring for an invalid wife, nursing really.’

  ‘Your wife’s an invalid?’

  ‘Best to think of Ada as that. Best for Ada, she says herself, best for me. It’s what it amounts to, as a matter of honest fact, no good denying it, no good pulling the wool. You follow me, Felicia?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘If you face the facts you can take them in your stride. I had a sergeant-major under me said that, top-class man. You meet all sorts in a regimental career.’