William Trevor was born in 1928 at Mitchelstown, County Cork, spent his childhood in provincial Ireland, and now lives in Devon. He attended a number of Irish schools and later Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He has written many novels, including The Old Boys (1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize; The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and Fools of Fortune (1983), both winners of the Whitbread Fiction Award; The Silence in the Garden (1988), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Two Lives (1991), which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker-shortlisted novella Reading Turgenev, Felicia’s Journey (1994), which won both the Whitbread and Sunday Express Book of the Year Awards; Death in Summer. (1998); and, most recently, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), which was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Award. A celebrated short-story writer, his most recent collections are After Rain (1996); The Hill Bachelors, which won the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Irish Times Literature Prize; and A Bit on the Side (2004). He is also the editor of The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989). He has written plays for the stage and for radio and television; several of his television plays have been based on his short stories. Most of his books are available in Penguin.

In 1976 William Trevor received the Allied Irish Banks Prize, and in 1977 he was awarded an honorary CBE in recognition of his valuable services to literature. In 1992 he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime’s literary achievement. And in 2002, he was knighted for his services to literature.

Many critics and writers have praised his work: to Hilary Mantel he is ‘one of the contemporary writers I most admire’ and to Carol Shields ‘a worthy chronicler of our times’. In the Spectator Anita Brookner wrote, ‘These novels will endure. And in every beautiful sentence there is not a word out of place’, and John Banville believes William Trevor’s novels to be ‘among the most subtle and sophisticated fiction being written today’.

She keeps being sick. A woman in the washroom says: ‘You’d be better off in the fresh air. Wouldn’t you go up on the deck?’ It’s cold on the deck and the wind hurts her ears. When she has been sick over the rail she feels better and goes downstairs again, to where she was sitting before she went to the washroom. The clothes she picked out for her journey are in two green carrier bags; the money is in her handbag. She had to pay for the carrier bags in Chawke’s, fifty pence each. They have Chawke’s name on them, and a Celtic pattern round the edge. At the bureau de change she has been given English notes for her Irish ones. Not many people are travelling. Shrieking and pretending to lose their balance, schoolchildren keep passing by where she is huddled. A family sits quietly in a corner, all of them with their eyes closed. Two elderly women and a priest are talking about English race-courses. It is the evening ferry; she wasn’t in time for the morning one. ‘That’s Ireland’s Eye,’ one of the children called out not long after the boat drew away from the quayside, and Felicia felt safe then. It seems a year ago since last night, when she crept with the carrier bags from the bedroom she shares with her great-grandmother to the backyard shed, to hide them behind a jumble of old floorboards her father intends to make a cold frame out of. In the morning, while the old woman was still sleeping, she waited in the shed until the light came on in the kitchen, an indication that her father was back from Heverin’s with the Irish Press. Then she slipped out the back way to the Square, twenty-five minutes early for the 7.45 bus. All the time she was nervous in case her father or her brothers appeared, and when the bus started to move she squinted sideways out of the window, a hand held up to her face. She kept telling herself that they couldn’t know about the money yet, that they wouldn’t even have found the note she’d left, but none of that was a help. For a while Felicia sleeps, and then goes to the washroom again. Two girls are putting on deodorant, passing the roll-on container to one another, the buttons of their shirts undone. ‘Sorry,’ Felicia says when she has been sick, but the girls say it doesn’t matter. There can’t be much left inside her, she thinks, because she hasn’t had much to eat that day. ‘Take a drink of water,’ one of the girls advises. ‘We’ll be in in twenty minutes.’ The other girl asks her if she is OK, and she says she is. She brushes her teeth and a woman beside her picks up the toothbrush when she puts it down on the edge of the basin. ‘God, I’m sorry!’ the woman apologizes when Felicia protests. ‘I thought it was the ship’s.’ Typical of her to go out somewhere at a peculiar time like this, her father would have said when she wasn’t there to assist with the breakfast frying; typical of the way she is these days. He wouldn’t have found the note until he went in with the old woman’s breakfast. ‘She’s taken herself off,’ he’d have told her brothers and there wouldn’t have been time to talk about it before her brothers left for the quarries. She wonders if he went to the Guards; he mightn’t have wanted to do that in spite of everything, you never knew with him. But he’d have had to call in next door to ask Mrs Quigly to keep an eye on the old woman during the day, to give her her cream crackers and half a tin of soup at twelve, the way Mrs Quigly always used to when Felicia was still working in the meat factory. Announcements are made. There’s a flutter of activity among the passengers, suitcases gathered up, obedient congregating in a designated area. A blast of cold air sweeps in when the doors are opened for disembarkation, and then the small throng moves forward on to the gangway. In the evening, when her father and her brothers had returned to the house, they’d have sat in the kitchen, with the note on the table, her father shaking his head slowly and mournfully, as if he in particular had been harshly treated: everything was always worst for her father. One of her brothers would have said he’d go down to McGrattan Street to tell Aidan, and whichever one it was would have called in at Myles Brady’s bar on the way back. Her father would have cooked the old woman’s supper and then their own, stony-faced at the stove. Felicia’s nervousness returns as she passes with the other passengers into a bleak, unfurnished building in which a security officer questions her. ‘Have you means of identification?’ he demands. ‘Identification?’ ‘What’s your name?’ Felicia tells him. He asks if she has a driver’s licence. ‘I can’t drive actually.’ ‘Have you another form of identification?’ ‘I can’t think that I have.’ ‘No letter? No documentation of any kind?’ She shakes her head. He asks if she is resident in the UK and she says no, in Ireland. ‘You’re here on a visit, are you, miss?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And what’s the purpose of this visit?’ ‘To see a friend.’ ‘And you’re travelling on to where?’ ‘The Birmingham area. North of Birmingham.’ ‘May I look through your bags for a moment? Would you mind just stepping aside, miss?’ He pokes about among her clothes and the extra pair of shoes she has brought. She thinks he’ll comment when he comes across the banknotes in her handbag, but he doesn’t. ‘I’ll just jot down the address of your friend,’ he says. ‘Would you give me that, please?’ ‘I don’t know it. I have to find him yet.’ ‘He’s not expecting you?’ ‘He’s not really.’ ‘You’re sure you’ll find him?’ ‘I will, through his place of work.’ Her interrogator nods. He is a man of about the same age as her father, with a featureless face. He is wearing a black overcoat, open at the front. ‘I’ll just jot down your address in Ireland,’ he says. She says she is from Mountmellick, the first town that comes into her head. She gives an address she makes up: 23 St Mary’s Terrace. ‘Right,’ the security man says. No one stops her at the Customs. She asks where the trains go from, and is directed. When she makes further inquiries she is informed that the train for Birmingham isn’t due to leave until a quarter past two. It is now just after midnight. For a while, in the waiting-room, she sleeps. She dreams: that she is shopping for meat in Scaddan’s, that Mr Scaddan thumps a huge cut of liver on to the weighing-scales and says he took it out of the bullock himself. This isn’t true; in her dream she is aware that it isn’t; Mr Scaddan is well known for his tall stories. One of the young Christian Brothers comes into the shop and Mr Scaddan says it is a disgrace, but she doesn’t know what the butcher is talking about. ‘I was out for a walk one night,’ he says to the Christian Brother. ‘Down by the old gasworks.’ She knows then. The train comes in, long before it’s due to go out again. Felicia makes certain it is the right one, and when the journey begins she falls asleep again. Wakened by the ticket-collector, she is drowsily confused for a moment, not knowing where she is. The man is patient while she searches in her handbag for her ticket. Her mother’s calm features are snagged in her consciousness, the residue of another dream. ‘Thank you,’ the man says, passing on. The dream about her mother has gone; but although she cannot recall what it was about, it has stirred her memory. ‘Hurry now, for Mrs Quigly,’ her great-grandmother ordered her that day, ages ago. ‘And tell Father Kilgallen he’s wanted quickly.’ The old woman was holding a cup of tea to her mother’s lips and her mother’s eyes were half closed; her cheeks were the colour of cement. ‘Mrs Quigly! Mrs Quigly!’ She was six that day, banging the letter-box of the house next door. Later she had to run to keep up with Father Kilgallen’s urgent stride in Main Street and the Square, and when they got to the house Mrs Quigly and the old woman helped her mother into the bedroom. Father Kilgallen whispered there, and then her brothers came in from the Christian Brothers’ and Aidan went to get her father from the convent garden. It was her father who drew the sheet over her mother’s face, a last few minutes he had with her while they waited in the kitchen and Aidan cried. The satchel with her schoolbooks in it was on the floor where she had dropped it, light-blue and shiny, Minnie Mouse with pink shoes on the flap. ‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Quigly said, taking her apron off after she’d crossed herself, the flowers on it too garish now. ‘Thank God,’ Father Kilgallen said because he had arrived in time. ‘I’ve outlived another one,’ the old woman said. The train judders on, rattling on the rails, slowing almost to a halt, gathering speed again. Felicia opens her eyes. A hazy dawn is distributing farmhouses and silos and humped barns in shadowy fields. Later, there are long lines of motor cars creeping slowly on nearby roads, and blank early-morning faces at railway stations. Pylons and aerials clutter a skyline, birds scavenge at a rubbish tip. There’s never a stretch of empty countryside. The train fills up. Newspapers are read in silence, eyes that meet by accident at once averted. Everything – people and houses and motorcars, pylons and aerials – are packed together as if there isn’t quite enough room to accommodate them. Faces acquire an edginess when the train threatens to stop even though it isn’t at a station. Johnny will be going to work, too: Felicia imagines him, hurrying as everyone else is, but carefree, not worrying about it, because that is his way. For as long as she can she retains an image of his easy-going expression, then of his profile the afternoon he took the bus himself, the last time she saw him, when he didn’t know she was still in the Square; as a faraway, whispering echo, there is the murmur of his voice.

Although he does not know it, Mr Hilditch weighs nineteen and a half stone, a total that has been steady for more than a dozen years, rarely increasing or decreasing by as much as a pound. Christened Joseph Ambrose fifty-four years ago, Mr Hilditch wears spectacles that have a pebbly look, keeps his pigeon-coloured hair short, dresses always in a suit with a waistcoat, ties his striped tie into a tight little knot, polishes his shoes twice a day, and is given to smiling pleasantly. Regularly, the fat that bulges about his features is rolled back and well-kept teeth appear, while a twinkle livens the blurred pupils behind his spectacles. His voice is faintly high-pitched. Mr Hilditch’s hands are small, seeming not to belong to the rest of him: deft, delicate fingers that can insert a battery into a watch or tidily truss a chicken, this latter a useful accomplishment, for of all things in the world Mr Hilditch enjoys eating. Often considering that he has not consumed sufficient during the course of a meal, he treats himself to a Bounty bar or a Mars or a packet of biscuits. The appreciation of food, he calls it privately. Once an invoice clerk, Mr Hilditch is now, suitably, a catering manager. Fifteen years ago, when his predecessor in this position retired, he was summoned by the factory management and the notion of a change of occupation was put to him. As he well knew, the policy was that vacancies, where possible, should be filled from within, and his interest in meals and comestibles had not gone unnoticed; all that was necessary was that he should go on a brief catering course. For his part, he was aware that computers were increasingly taking their toll of office staff and when the offer was made he knew better than to hesitate: as a reward for long and satisfactory service, redundancy was being forestalled. Mr Hilditch occupies on his own a detached house standing in shrubberies that run all around it, Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road. In 1979 his mother died in this house; he never knew his father. Left on his own at the time of the death, he committed to auction the furniture that had accumulated in his mother’s lifetime and from then on made Number Three solely his. Visiting salerooms at weekends, he filled it with articles, large and small, all of them to his personal taste: huge mahogany cupboards and chests, ivory trinkets for his mantelpieces, secondhand Indian carpets, and elaborately framed portraits of strangers. Twenty mezzotints of South African military scenes decorate the staircase wall, an umbrella-stand in marble and mahogany vies for pride of place with a set of antlers in a spacious hallway. Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road is commodious enough to contain all Mr Hilditch has purchased: built in 1867 to the designs of a tea merchant, it spreads from this lofty entrance hall to kitchen and pantries at the back, and reception rooms of generous proportions to the left and right of the hall door. Upstairs, that generosity is repeated. Four bedrooms open off the first-floor landing, with a further four above them. Ceilings are rich in plasterwork mouldings and cornices. Ornate gas lamps, no longer in use, still protrude from the walls. Mr Hilditch regularly dusts them, an attention that over the years has resulted in a dull glow on the protuberances of the decoration. In spring and summer he attends to the shrubberies, keeping them clear of weeds, though not growing anything new. He sweeps up the fallen leaves in autumn and from time to time repairs the wooden boundary fences. The private life of Mr Hilditch is on the one hand ordinary and expected, on the other secretive. To his colleagues at the factory he appears to be, in essence, as jovial and agreeable as his exterior intimates. His bulk suggests a man careless of his own longevity, his smiling presence indicates an extrovert philosophy. But Mr Hilditch, in his lone moments, is often brought closer to other, darker, aspects of the depths that lie within him. When a smile no longer matters he can be a melancholy man. But on a Wednesday morning in February Mr Hilditch is aware of considerable elation: once a fortnight on Wednesdays the factory lunch includes turkey pie, and a fortnight has passed since it was on the menu. He dwells upon this fact as he fries his breakfast eggs and sausages and bacon, and toasts pieces of thick-sliced Mother’s Pride. It lingers in his thoughts while he eats in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat at the kitchen table, and while he washes up at the sink. Temporarily, at least, the anticipated lunchtime dish recedes then. He lowers the drying-rack from the ceiling, drapes the tea-cloth he has used over a rail and raises the rack again. He visits the lavatory with the Daily Telegraph, and soon afterwards lets himself out of his front door, double-locking it behind him. His small green car is waiting on the gravelled driveway. The shrubberies that shield the house from the street are dank and dripping on a misty morning. Mr Hilditch drives slowly, as his habit is: he never drives fast, he sees no point in it. Being of the neighbourhood, born and bred in the town he now passes through, he has seen some changes. The most lasting, and fundamental, occurred in the decade of the 1950s when the town expanded and was to a considerable degree rebuilt in order to house and facilitate the employees of the factories that arrived in the area during that time. These factories are different from those that distinguished the town in the past, their manufacturing processes being of a lighter nature. Now, there is plain, similar architecture everywhere, shops and office blocks laid out in a grid of straight lines, intersections at right angles. Wide pedestrian walkways were planted in the 1950s with shrubs and flowers in long, raised central beds; and the new town’s architects included burgeoning arcades, and hanging baskets on the street lights. Since then the soil has soured in the long raised beds; heathers have died there, leaving only browned strands behind, among which beer cans and discarded containers of instant food provide what splashes of colour there are. The flowered arcades are bare metal arches, the hanging baskets rusty. But paint-gun graffiti enliven the smooth brown concrete of a sculptured group – man, woman and child in stylized lumbering gait, en route from the post office to a multistorey car park. Among low-slung office blocks an ersatz mosaic patterns the wall of a chain-store. Familiar logos – of shops and banks and building societies – snappily claim attention. In Mr Hilditch’s opinion the town is a city and should be known as such. It is the size of a city and has a city’s population, but it does not possess a cathedral, which someone – his Uncle Wilf, as far as he can remember – once pointed out is the stipulation where urban status is concerned. Instead, there are six churches, four of different denominations, a synagogue and a mosque. There is a leisure centre, completed in 1981, which Mr Hilditch has never entered and considers a waste of public money. He passes it now, then skirts the central area and patiently waits at the roundabout where traffic at this particular time of the morning invariably comes to a halt. After that the journey is easier, and within minutes he is driving through yellow factory gates. He parks where the registration number of his car is painted on the tarmac, and walks at an unhurried pace to his office – a partitioned corner of what was once a larger office – beyond the loading bays. As an invoice clerk in the old days, he worked there before all the partitioning went up, with seven other clerks in the same office space, each at a desk. Just before midday on this Wednesday – a day that so far strikes Mr Hilditch as being in no way special apart from the promise of turkey pie – he makes his way to the kitchens in order to taste the lunchtime menu in full. Beginning with the pie, he passes from flaky crust to meat, then sips the gravy. An alternative dish is a casserole of beef diced with vegetables: dutifully, he samples this also – and potatoes, roasted and mashed, Brussels sprouts and parsnips. ‘Splendid,’ Mr Hilditch compliments his cooks. ‘Good show.’ He tries the raspberry-jam steamed pudding, the custard, and the apple crumble. He examines a costing print-out of each dish separately calculated, labour and electricity costs, ingredients as an individual total. His task is to avoid a loss – a task in which his predecessor was rarely successful – and over fifteen years he has done so, responsible for a transformation in the factory’s catering accounts that has not gone unacknowledged. ‘Good, that’s very good,’ he pronounces when he has glanced through the figures, the pleasant taste of raspberry jam still clinging to his palate. He smiles as he hands back the papers, reflecting that he will certainly go for the raspberry steamed pudding when he makes his choice of what to have after the turkey pie. He ambles about the huge, greasy kitchens for a few more moments, genially chatting to the cooking staff, who are part-time women mostly. Then, his appetite whetted, he makes his way to the canteen. It pleases him to be first in the canteen every day: he feels it emphasizes his position and draws attention to the fact that this hour of relaxation for all the factory workers, no matter what their status, is ordained by him. There is a dining-room for the managerial staff which he has a right to use but never does. The food is identical in both places. At ten to one the shop-floor hooters sound, and soon after that the workers arrive, men and women, girls and apprentices. They queue up with trays at the long counter, shouting at one another, sharing jokes and mild obscenities. Mr Hilditch smiles at individuals as they pass close to where he sits, all of them in their working clothes, some with the Sun or the Daily Mirror under an arm. They trust him, he feels. They trust the food for which he is ultimately responsible because from experience they know they can, and that gives him pleasure. He can’t imagine his existence now if he had remained an invoice clerk. Head of Invoices he would have become in time, but only his close associates would have known that such a title existed. There would have been no question of a place in the managerial dining-room, or the luxury of rejecting it. ‘Damp one hour, cold the next,’ a man going by grumbles. ‘You don’t know where you are with it, Mr Hilditch.’ ‘Shocking.’ Mr Hilditch smiles back. ‘But at least the days’ll be getting longer.’ ‘Enjoy your meal, Mr Hilditch.’ A woman with a tray nods pleasantly as she passes. ‘And yourself, Iris.’ It is an expression they often use, ‘enjoy your meal’: picked up from the television, he supposes. Mr Hilditch doesn’t have television himself. He hired a set once, but found he never turned it on. Sometimes, in reply to the good wishes about his meal, he says he enjoys all his meals, a little pleasantry that invariably causes amusement. In the canteen the bustle has increased. He can no longer hear the greetings and comments from the queue by the counter. Dishes and knives and forks rattle on the trays, the trays themselves noisily deposited. In the smoking area cigarettes are lit; another queue forms for cups of tea or coffee; newspapers are spread out on table-tops. Mr Hilditch likes to watch it all. Flirtations begin or continue in the canteen; girls, sometimes women, eye the young apprentices; men, known to Mr Hilditch to be married, chance their luck. Besides this kind of thing there are a couple of long-established liaisons. A man called Frank from the finishing shop, older by a few years than Mr Hilditch, sits every day with one of the Indian women; Annette from the paint shop keeps a place at the same corner table for young Kevin, to whom she could give fifteen years at least. You can’t tell what is going on or if at other times, outside the factory, these companionships continue. Everyone knows, yet Mr Hilditch reckons that no one, meeting the legal partners of these people, would divulge a thing. The factory is another world; within it, so is his canteen. He finishes his steamed pudding and queues for tea, exchanging further views on the weather with those on either side of him. He returns to the kitchens, stands for a moment in the doorway, then makes his way out of the building to his office beyond the loading bays. As he progresses on the tarmacadamed surface, taking his time while digesting, he notices a solitary figure ahead of him. It is a girl in a red coat and a headscarf, carrying two plastic bags. He notices when he is closer to her that she is round-faced, wide-eyed, and has an air of being lost. He doesn’t recognize her; she doesn’t belong. Chawke’s it says on the plastic bags, bold black letters on green. He has never heard the name before; it doesn’t belong, either. ‘I don’t know am I in the right place,’ the girl says as he is about to pass her by, and Mr Hilditch smiles in his usual way. Irish, he says to himself. ‘What place are you looking for?’ ‘The lawn-mower factory. Someone said it could be here.’ ‘We don’t make lawn-mowers, I’m afraid.’ ‘Then I’ve got it wrong.’ ‘I’m afraid you have.’ ‘D’you know the place I’m looking for?’ He shakes his head. Lawn-mowers are not manufactured anywhere near here, he says. ‘Oh.’ She stands there awkwardly, her mouth depressed at the corners, her eyes worried. Escaping from the headscarf, wisps of fair hair blow about her face; a tiny cross, on a cheap silver-coloured chain, is just visible beneath her coat. Being curious by nature, Mr Hilditch wonders what her plastic bags contain. ‘I have a friend works in the stores of a lawn-mower factory. The only thing is I’m not certain where it is.’ ‘There are definitely no lawn-mowers manufactured round here.’ The nearest to anything like that would be on the industrial estate half a mile away, where there are garden-supply showrooms. Pritchard’s on the estate do grass-cutters – Mountfield, Flymo, Japanese. ‘Haven’t you got your friend’s address?’ The girl shakes her head. She only has the name of this town, and the lawn-mower information. ‘Pritchard’s is retail, nothing manufactured there.’ ‘Maybe I got it wrong about a factory.’ ‘Try the estate anyway. It could be they’d put you in touch.’ Mr Hilditch, who is a careful man, doesn’t wish to be seen with a girl on the factory premises. No one has observed their meeting, of that he is certain. No windows overlook the tarmacadam expanse; no one is, or has been, about. He has never been seen in the company of a girl on the factory premises, nor anywhere in the immediate neighbourhood. Nothing like that on your own doorstep is the rule he has. ‘Walk out the yellow gates, the way you came in.’ He hurries the directions, hardly waiting for the nods of acknowledgement they elicit. ‘Turn right and keep on until you come to the dual carriageway. Turn left there. After that you’ll see the sign to the estate. Blackbarrow Industrial Estate it says.’ Mr Hilditch nods to himself, an indication that the encounter has reached an end. Then abruptly he turns away from the girl and continues on his way.

Since she arrived in the town that morning Felicia has discovered that she cannot always understand what people say because they speak in an accent that is unfamiliar to her. Even when they repeat their statements there is a difficulty, and sometimes she has to give up. On the industrial estate she makes inquiries in a building that sells office requirements – filing-cabinets and revolving chairs as well as paper in bulk and supplies of envelopes and fasteners and transparent tape, everything stacked up higgledy-piggledy, not as in a shop. Half of what the girl says in reply escapes her, but she knows it doesn’t matter because the girl keeps shaking her head, denying in this way all knowledge of a lawn-mower factory. The industrial estate is an endless repetition of nondescript commercial buildings, each with a forecourt for parking. Trade names blazon: Toyota, Ford, Toys ‘Я’ Us, National Tyre and Autocare, Kwik-Fit, Zanussi, Renault Trucks, Pipewise, Ready-bag, Sony, Comet. Next to Britannia Scaffolding are Motorway Exhausts, then C & S Roofing, Deep Drilling Services and Tomorrow’s Cleaning Today. At an intersection a little further on, Allparts Vehicle Dismantlers share the corner with OK Blast & Spray Ltd. The concrete roads of the estate are long and straight. Nobody casually walks them for the pleasure of doing so. No dogs meet other dogs. Business is in all directions, buying and selling, disposal and acquisition, discount for cash. It takes Felicia nearly two hours to find Pritchard’s Garden Requisites and Patio Centre. ‘A rotary you’re thinking of, is it?’ the salesman responds in answer to her query, and she asks if the place is a factory, if the lawn-mowers are made here. ‘We have our workshops on the premises for after-care. The annual service we recommend, though it’s entirely up to you. You’d be going for electric, would you?’ ‘I’m looking for a friend. He works in the stores of a lawn-mower factory.’ The man’s manner changes. He can’t help her, he states flatly, disappointment emptying his tone of expression. ‘Someone I met said you might be able to tell me where a factory was.’ ‘Our machines are manufactured in works all over the country. I’m sorry. I believe someone else requires my attention.’ A couple are measuring garden furniture with a dressmaking tape. They’re after something for their conservatory, they inform the salesman. Felicia goes away. A man in a Volkswagen showroom is patient with her but doesn’t know of a lawn-mower factory in the vicinity. Then an afterthought strikes him as she’s leaving and he mentions the name of a town that he says is twenty-five or -six miles off. When it occurs to him that she’s bewildered by what he’s saying he writes the name down on the edge of a brochure. ‘Not the full shilling’, is an expression her father uses, and ‘Nineteen and six in the pound’: she wonders if the man is thinking that. No one else can help her. She walks through the estate, investigating every road, inquiring in a do-it-yourself emporium and in Britannia Scaffolding. In OK Blast & Spray Ltd a woman draws a map for her, but when she follows the arrows on it she finds herself at a plumbers’ supply warehouse that is closed. She returns to Pritchard’s Garden Requisites and Patio Centre in the hope that the salesman isn’t busy now. Crosser than before, he ignores her. She tramps wearily back to the town, on the grass verge beside a wide dual carriageway. An endless chain of lorries and cars passes close, the noise of their engines a roar that every few moments rises as a crescendo, their headlights on because it has become foggy. The scrubby grass she walks on is grey, in places black, decorated by the litter that is scattered all around her – crushed cigarette packets, plastic bags, cans and bottles, crumpled sheets from newspapers, cartons. In the middle of the morning she had a cup of tea and a piece of fruitcake; she hasn’t had anything since and she doesn’t feel hungry, but she knows that as soon as she arrives back in the town she will have to find somewhere to spend the night. Her arms ache from the weight of the two carrier bags; her feet are sore, blisters in two different places, one of her heels skinned. She knew it wouldn’t be easy; even before she set out she knew it wouldn’t be; she hadn’t been expecting anything else. What has happened is her own fault, due to her own foolishness in not making certain she had an address. She can’t blame anyone else. Yet in spite of everything she wouldn’t not be here, closer to him. On the day of Aidan’s wedding, when she was Connie Jo’s bridesmaid, when she held her bouquet of autumn flowers, she hardly knew he existed, yet the day has been special ever since because it was then, suddenly, that he was there, the beginning of everything. In the Church of Our Saviour she had been thinking that her shoulders were ungainly, that her face hadn’t responded to the softening attentions of Carmel’s make-up, that no doubt her hair had gone limp. Tulle and lace stretched flatly over the upper half of her body and she wished she had taken Carmel’s advice and puffed her brassiere up with wads of cottonwool. ‘God, you’re gawky,’ Carmel used to say when they were twelve, and she felt she still was, at seventeen on the day of her brother’s wedding. ‘I will,’ Aidan responded to Father Kilgallen at the altar, and Connie Jo said it too. Afterwards on the steps they smiled for the bald photographer – she and Connie Jo, and Moss McGuire with his best man’s buttonhole, carnation and asparagus fern, similar to Aidan’s. Confetti clung to their shoulders on the walk from the church to Hickey’s Hotel in the Square, and was carried into the Kincora Lounge, where Connie Jo’s kid sister was already asking for Pepsi Cola. Sister Benedict, who loved the weddings of her convent girls, was perched on the scarlet upholstery of a gold-painted chair, one of a set arrayed against the walls. The scarlet was soiled where it bulged, the gold of the legs worn away in patches, or chipped. Barry Manilow whispered softly through the speakers. As Felicia progresses on the dual carriageway, the faces of that October afternoon jostle in her thoughts; scraps of conversation echo. The Reverend Mother, and other nuns, joined Sister Benedict, specially invited because the father of the bridegroom was the gardener at the convent. Artie Slattery, who supplied the cake, stood near it with his buxom wife. Old Begley, who attended all funerals and weddings as a matter of course, waited for the first of the food to appear. Sergeant Breen, off duty, and Fogarty the tractor-repair man, crossed the hall of the hotel from the front bar to the Kincora Lounge at the invitation of the bride’s father. Mr Logan, proprietor of the Two-Screen Ritz and the Dancetime Disco, was natty in a chalk-striped suit and blue bow-tie, as befitted the locality’s most prominent businessman and bachelor. Welcoming guests at the door, Connie Jo’s mother was unable to dispel from her expression the opinion that her daughter, by marrying a plasterer, had married beneath her. Connie Jo was Felicia’s friend, had been since their time at the convent, which Felicia was privileged to attend because of her father’s connection with it. Occasionally, when a nun was cross, Felicia had been reminded that she was there on sufferance. The nuns weren’t always severe, but those who still favoured the tradition of honouring sacred figures in their names had seemed so to Felicia before she knew some of them better: Sister Antony Ixida, Sister Ignatius Loyola, Sister Francis Xavier, Sister Benedict, Sister Justina. ‘How’re things at the quarries?’ Tim Bo Gargan inquired of Felicia’s big twin brothers. Things were all right, they replied and left it at that, no more communicative at a wedding party than at any other time. ‘How’re you doing, Felicia?’ Small Crowley asked, speaking out of the corner of his mouth the way he believed American gangsters did, eyeing Carmel while he spoke because it was Carmel he was interested in. ‘How’re you doing, Carmel?’ he plucked up the courage to ask eventually, causing Carmel’s cousin Rose to giggle. ‘Any time you want it, Aidan,’ Connie Jo’s father offered, ‘there’s a place for you in McGrattan Street Cycles and Prams.’ Tim Bo Gargan tried for Scott Joplin on the piano, but desisted when there were protests. Trifle was handed round. ‘Ah no, no, you look great, Felicia,’ Connie Jo reassured her, and Carmel and Rose agreed that of course she did. Small Crowley struck a match on his thumbnail and said he’d heard Fogarty had been out all morning trying to start a tractor in some farmer’s field, which was the reason why a smell of petrol was coming off him. ‘We’ll have the cake soon,’ Connie Jo’s mother announced, interrupting the conversations in the Kincora Lounge, and then the cake was cut and there was applause, with glasses and tea-cups raised. In the hall the children opened and closed the lift doors. ‘You’re wanted! You’re wanted!’ they called up the stairs, and a girl Felicia didn’t know told her that Dessie Flynn had put the remains of a chicken salad in a bed. ‘Hold on to that confetti till they’re outside,’ Hickey of the hotel begged when the bride and groom were ready to go. ‘Keep the confetti for the street, lads.’ Everyone was moving out of the hotel behind Aidan and Connie Jo, and a cheer went up when they stepped into the car Connie Jo’s father had hired for them. ‘Bray,’ Tim Bo Gargan knowledgeably declared. ‘I’d say they’re headed for Bray.’ The car drove round the Square. The guests re-entered the hotel, and it was then that Johnny Lysaght passed by on the pavement. It was then that he paused and looked, and saw her in her bridesmaid’s dress. As long as she lives, Felicia has told herself many times since, that moment will never lose its potency: her father’s back, his grey head as he passed through the swing doors, and how she turned to catch a final glimpse of her brother and her friend in their be-ribboned wedding car, and instead caught the eye of a man who was passing by; how she smiled because he smiled; how she said to herself afterwards that this was when she knew the beginning of love. The moment is still vivid when she reaches the outskirts of the town that that love has brought her to. Dark-skinned shopkeepers are closing their small premises. Racks of newspapers are unhooked from doorways, displays of vegetables lifted inside. The houses that separate these solitary stores from one another are drab; discoloured concrete is dominant, the metal of skimpy window-frames rusting through its covering of paint. The prevalence of litter continues, blown in from the road or spilt out of dustbins, accumulating on a small expanse in front of each of the shops. ‘You didn’t have any luck?’ a voice says, and Felicia turns to find the fat man she asked directions of smiling at her from a car that is keeping pace with her, close to the edge of the pavement. The car comes to a halt when she stops herself, a small green vehicle with an old-fashioned humped back, so modest you’d hardly think the man would fit in it. He’s wearing a hat now; his features are shadowy in the gloom of the car’s interior. She shakes her head. She understands what he says more easily than she understood the others: having to try so hard on the estate added to her tiredness. ‘No, it’s not there.’ A man wrote down the name of another town for her, she says, and takes the car salesman’s brochure from a pocket of her coat. He nods over it, commenting that the man may be right about that town. It’s the town where Thompson Castings is: he’d thought of Thompson’s himself five minutes after she’d gone. But she won’t get a bus in that direction tonight. ‘I’ll stay here so.’ ‘You have somewhere?’ ‘I’m just going to look for a place.’ Just before he spoke to her she’d decided to make inquiries about inexpensive lodgings. During the day she passed a bus station: they would know there, she’d thought, and was about to ask someone on the street to direct her to it when the car drew in beside her. ‘Marshring,’ the fat man says. ‘That’s where a lot of the accommodation is.’ She asks him where Marshring is and he says: ‘Straight ahead, second on the right. Left at the bottom, that’s Marshring. There’s the Crescent and the Avenue. Ten minutes’ walk.’ When she thanks him he nods and smiles. His glasses glint from the shadows as he turns his head away while still winding up the window. ‘Thanks again.’ Felicia moves on and eventually turns into the road that has been mentioned. She follows it down a hill to Marshring Crescent, where there are notices in most of the windows, offering overnight lodgings. Bed & breakfast with evening meal, £11, one says. She pushes open a small ornamental gate and passes between two narrow areas of uncultivated garden. Then, wondering if she has closed the gate, she glances behind her to make sure. At the end of Marshring Crescent she notices what seems to be the humpbacked green car, but presumes she is mistaken.

Felicia wakes in the middle of the night, and fragments remain from dreams as they evaporate. ‘I’ve brought you a shell,’ Sister Benedict is saying, and a boy runs out in front of the Corpus Christi procession and someone waves from a window. Flanagan’s Quarries is on one of the lorries her brothers drive, parked by Myles Brady’s bar as the procession goes by. Passing Aldritt’s garage, you can see petrol vapour in the bright sunlight, a man filling his car at the pumps. ‘Angels flying low,’ Sister Francis Xavier says, but that isn’t something that began in a dream, although perhaps it came into one. Sister Francis Xavier said it whenever she referred to the Little Sisters who worked among the heathen of Africa. Just as the Reverend Mother used to tell how St Ursula set forth with her girl-companions, sailing the world because she wished to keep herself holy. ‘You never considered the celibate life, Felicia?’ the Reverend Mother inquired once, out of the blue. Afterwards, when she told them, Carmel and Rose said she had the face for a nun. When people went to the sea they brought her back shells because her mother had died. She arranged them on the chest of drawers in the bedroom she shared, but her great-grandmother kept knocking them off by accident so she kept them in one of her drawers instead. The first time she saw the sea herself was when she came on this journey. ‘The sea, the sea, the open sea…’ Reciting that in class one day, she couldn’t remember what came next. She stood there, going red, ashamed because she’d known it off pat the evening before. Felicia closes her eyes in the darkness, but does not sleep. The details of her journey impinge – the sickness, the woman who used her toothbrush in the washroom, the security man’s questions, one train and then another, asking where the factory was, the hatchet-faced landlady who brought her shepherd’s pie and tinned fruit in the empty dining-room, the cup of tea afterwards. Then Johnny is there, lightening the tiredness and frustrations of the day before: his grey-green eyes, his dark hair, the neat point of his chin, his high cheekbones. She sees him in a factory crowd, the first in a throng that comes out of Thompson Castings, hurrying as if he has a premonition that she’ll be waiting for him, his deft, angular movement. ‘The other day I thought it was you was the bride’: the Monday after the wedding it was when he spoke to her on the street, coming up to her outside Chawke’s. She loves making it happen again, better than any dream or any imagining because it’s real. ‘Ah no, no,’ she said, shaking her head, not adding that she didn’t think she’d ever be a bride. A woman in Chawke’s window was changing the clothes on the models, replacing the summer styles. ‘Johnny Lysaght,’ he said, smiling friendlily as he had when she was in her bridesmaid’s dress. ‘D’you remember me at all?’ She remembered him vaguely from way back, when he was still at the Christian Brothers’. He was seven, maybe eight, years older than she was; he didn’t live in the neighbourhood any more; occasionally he returned to see his mother. ‘How are you getting on?’ she said. Lying there with her eyes still closed, she hears her own voice boldly asking that because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. He had never belonged with the Lomasney lot or Small Crowley’s crowd; he’d been more on his own, going off to Dublin when he left the Brothers’ and soon after that going to England. He had an English accent. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Yourself, Felicia?’ ‘Out of work.’ ‘Weren’t you in the meat place?’ ‘It closed down.’ He smiled again. He asked why Slieve Bloom Meats had closed down and she explained; again it was something to say. A woman failed to report a cut on her hand that went septic, and an outbreak of food-poisoning was afterwards traced back to a batch of tinned kidney and beef. No more than a scratch the little cut had seemed to Mrs Grennan, even though it wouldn’t heal. Dr Mortell had seen it and given Mrs Grennan a note, but she had gone on working because when you went sick you sometimes found yourself laid off when you returned: since 1986, when there had been another food scare – one that was general in the processed-meat business then – the factory hadn’t been doing well. There was an opinion in the neighbourhood that sooner or later it would have closed down anyway, and with some justification Mrs Grennan believed she was a scapegoat. ‘Sure, the work’s gone and that’s all there’s to it,’ Felicia heard another woman comforting her at the time. ‘Does it matter whose fault it was?’ On the street outside Chawke’s Johnny Lysaght asked her if she had ever worked anywhere else and she said no, only at Slieve Bloom, where she’d been since she left the convent. She didn’t go into details. She didn’t say that, being out of work for the past three months, she saw no opportunity for further employment, at least in the locality. What experience she had was with canning, and although very little skill was required she could rapidly make the movements she had become familiar with, and had developed an eye for a faultily sealed can. You had to be trained to work a till in a supermarket, and the smaller shops preferred casual labour – schoolgirls or elderly women. There was never anything these days at Erin Floor Coverings or the hospital. If you waited you might get something in the kitchen of a public house that did dinners or in Hickey’s Hotel, but you’d easily wait a year. ‘I have a word put in for you with Sister Ignatius,’ her father reassured her from time to time, Sister Ignatius being the nun he had most to do with through his work in the garden of the convent. On the other hand, it eased matters, having her at home: she was company for her great-grandmother, who left neither her room nor her bed these days; she was able to attend to all of the cooking and the cleaning that previously had been shared. ‘It’s no joke being unemployed,’ Johnny Lysaght said, leaning against Chawke’s window. He undid the cellophane on a packet of cigarettes and offered her one. She shook her head. ‘It’s not, all right,’ she said. ‘No joke.’ Her freedom had been taken from her with the loss of her employment – the freedom to sit with Carmel and Rose and Connie Jo in the Diamond Coffee Dock, an evening at the Two-Screen Ritz without first having to calculate the cost. Within a few weeks of the canning factory’s closure she had spent what savings she’d accumulated, and it was only fair – as her father had made clear – that any dole money coming into the house should go towards board and upkeep. A family had to pull together, especially the family of a widower. ‘Come down to Sheehy’s,’ Johnny Lysaght invited. ‘A drink?’ ‘Ah no, I have to get back now.’ It was half past three in the afternoon. She had chops and greens to buy yet. The main meal was at a quarter to six because her brothers couldn’t get back from the quarries in the middle of the day, and her father was given something at half-twelve in the convent kitchen. At four she would put the chops on to stew, with half a turnip cut up, and a sliced onion. It was necessary to have the stew beginning to bubble by a quarter past. ‘Later on?’ Johnny Lysaght suggested. ‘Seven? Half-seven?’ In her lodging-house bed Felicia remembers wanting to say yes, but hesitating. She remembers feeling awkward, saying nothing. ‘Half-seven?’ Johnny Lysaght suggested again. ‘In Sheehy’s, d’you mean?’ ‘What’s wrong with Sheehy’s, Felicia?’ He laughed and she laughed, experiencing a surge of relief in her stomach. The cigarette packet was still in his hand; through his smile he blew out smoke. Why was he bothering with her? Carmel or Rose or any other girl she could think of would drop everything to go out with Johnny Lysaght. She hadn’t their looks; she wasn’t much. ‘I’ll see you,’ he said softly. The cadences in his voice, his smiling glances, flow through her night thoughts. As she walked away from him – to Scaddan’s for mutton chops and suet, to McCarthy’s for greens – a euphoria such as she had never experienced before made her almost want to cry. And it did not diminish while she peeled potatoes at the sink and blended ground rice with milk, while she beat up an egg and chopped the greens. From across the hall came her great-grandmother’s occasional grunt of impatience or a call for assistance when her jigsaw pieces clattered to the floor, the bedroom door open, as it always was during the day in case of an emergency. ‘How’s she been?’ Her father’s first utterance was the same as ever it was when he entered the kitchen at a quarter past five, but that evening the repetition had an airy freshness about it. Nor was it an irritation when his lowered voice – still loud enough to cross the hall – regaled his grandmother with the details of his day: how he had raked up the last of the grass cuttings and layered them into his compost stack, how Sister Antony Ixida had been on about tayberries again. ‘Who are you anyway?’ came the old woman’s familiar cry. ‘What do you want with me?’ Not wishing to think about the old woman, Felicia is not entirely successful when she tries to divert her thoughts. She remembers how – that lovely, different Monday evening – she in error set a place at the table for Aidan, forgetting that his home was in McGrattan Street now, in the flat about his in-laws’ bicycle and pram shop. At six her two other brothers came in from the quarries, as similar in their reticence as in their appearance, sitting down immediately at the kitchen table to await their food. ‘Yes, she’s struggling on,’ her father reported, returning from his visit to the bedroom and bringing with him an aura of the old woman. Her presence rekindled a spirit in him, her history had long been rooted in his sensibilities: that seventy-five years ago her husband of a month, with two companions, had died for Ireland’s freedom was a fact that was revered, through his insistence, in the household. The tragedy had left her destitute, with a child expected; had obliged her for the remainder of her active life to earn what she could by scrubbing the floors of offices and private houses. But the hardship was ennobled during all its years by the faith still kept with an ancient cause. Honouring the bloodshed there had been, the old woman outlived the daughter that was born to her, as well as the husband that daughter had married, and the wife of their only son. And when she outlived her own rational thought, Felicia’s father honoured the bloodshed on his own: regularly in the evenings he sat with his scrapbooks of those revolutionary times, three heavy volumes of wallpaper pattern books that Multilly of the hardware had let him have when their contents went out of date. All her life, for as long as Felicia could remember, she had been shown, among dahlias and roses, dots and stripes, smooth and embossed surfaces, the newspaper clippings, photographs and copies of documents that had been tidily glued into place. At the heart of the statement they made – the anchor of the whole collection, her father had many times repeated to her – was the combined obituary of the three local patriots, which had been kept by his grandmother among her few possessions until she decided it would be more safely preserved in the pages of the scrapbooks. Next in importance came a handwritten copy of Patrick Pearse’s proclamation of a provisional government, dated 24 April 1916, its seven signatories recorded in the same clerkly calligraphy. Columns of newsprint told of the firing of the General Post Office and the events at Boland’s Mills, of Roger Casement’s landing from a German U-boat on Banna Strand, of the shelling of Liberty Hall. The attacks on the Beggars’ Bush Barracks and the Mendicity Institute were recorded, as were the British occupancy of the Shelbourne Hotel and the executions of Pearse and Tom Clarke. There were the Mass cards of the local patriots, and letters that had come from sympathizers, and a photograph of the coffins. An article about the old penal laws had been pasted in, and another about the Irish Battalion. Patrick Pearse’s cottage in Connemara was on a postcard; on another the tricolour fluttered from a flagstaff. The Soldier’s Song in its entirety was there. 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.

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.

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.

The house is silent and in darkness. No pet is there to witness the homecoming of its single occupant, not a goldfish or a bird. A key turns in the deadlock, a second one clicks in the Yale. The spacious hall is illuminated, the breathy sound of an aborted whistle begins. Mr Hilditch hangs his mackintosh on the hall-stand, catching a single glimpse of himself in its octagonal mirror. Mechanically, he raises a hand to pat an area of his short hair. Other families’ ancestors regard him from the portraits he has purchased over the years, a strangers’ gallery that is no longer strange. In his kitchen he gathers together the ingredients of a meal. The frisson of excitement that has been with him all day is charged with a greater surge now that he has spoken to the Irish girl again: never before has there been a girl as close to home as this one, a girl who actually approached him on the works premises. Elsie Covington cropped up in Uttoxeter, Beth in Wolverhampton, Gaye in Market Drayton. Sharon was Wigston; Jakki, Walsall. All of them, like the Irish girl, came from further afield and were heading elsewhere, anywhere in most cases. You make the rule about not soiling your own doorstep, not shopping locally, as the saying goes; you go to lengths to keep the rule in place, but this time the thing just happened. Fruit falling from a tree you haven’t even shaken; something meant, it feels like. And perhaps to do with being approached rather than the other way round, Mr Hilditch senses a promise: this time the relationship is destined to be special. The snapshot memories begin again: weekend appearances in towns and places where no one knows he is Hilditch, a catering manager; hours spent in the car, watching from a vantage point near a disco that is due to end, or just parked anywhere on the off chance; up and down the motorways, alert on the approach roads in case there is another vehicle to keep close to; fatherly conversations with waitresses in bed-and-breakfast places, an invitation offered but not often accepted. Mr Hilditch wonders if the breaking of his meticulously kept rule is in some way related to the fact that the Irish girl comes from so far away, a foreigner you might say, the first time there has been that. She is the ultimate in passing trade, more than just a new face for the A522 Burger King or the Forest East Services, or the Long Eaton Little Chef. Whatever the reason for his own behaviour, he finds himself exhilarated by the circumstances that have been presented to him, and only regrets that the ordained brevity of this relationship is an element in those circumstances also. Perhaps that, he reflects as he washes a pound of brussels sprouts, is how perfection in a friendship has to be, unenduring lest it lose its quality. Grilling the steak he bought in Tesco’s on the way back to his house, draining potatoes and the Brussels sprouts, he effortlessly keeps the girl’s features in his consciousness. He lays the table in the dining-room, carrying in salt and pepper and a few slices of Mother’s Pride on a side plate. He always eats in the dining-room in the evenings. While waiting for the steak to grill, he scoops two individual trifles on to a plate, pours cream over them and sprinkles a spoonful of caster sugar. He carries the trifles to his long mahogany table, carrying, as well, his biscuit tin – raspberry creams and coffee creams, chocolate digestives, fig rolls, a couple of KitKats. Music plays softly: ‘Bugle Call Rag’. She walks about, still scanning the faces on the pavements. If the man hadn’t told her what he had, if he hadn’t sounded so certain, she might by now have convinced herself that she should go home in spite of what awaits her there. Again she wonders what they’re thinking now, what conclusions have been reached. Do they dread her return as much as she dreads it herself? That thought strikes her suddenly, not having occurred to her before. Are they hoping she has gone for ever? Is there a plea in Mrs Lysaght’s prayers that she should be lost, or even dead? ‘Did you go out with young Lysaght?’ her father asked, only a few hours after she handed to Mrs Lysaght the letter in a stamped envelope. ‘A while back?’ her father went on, his tone suggesting that some further turn of the screw was in store for her. ‘October?’ A man on the street asks her something, smiling at her. She doesn’t understand; she doesn’t answer. She didn’t answer, either, when her father asked those questions. She was polishing brass at the draining-board, ornaments and ashtrays which her father liked to see gleaming, as he did the brass on people’s hall doors. ‘Around about the time of the wedding?’ he pressed. ‘I know Johnny Lysaght,’ she said. She bent her head over a piece that represented three monkeys, their paws obscuring mouth, ears or eyes. The television, which was on earlier, had been turned off. ‘Did you go out with him, though?’ ‘I did.’ ‘I would avoid that fellow,’ her father said. ‘I would go out with some other young fellow.’ ‘What d’ you mean?’ ‘You hear certain remarks made about Lysaght.’ Her father’s grey head was poked out in Felicia’s direction, a habit he had when he was serious or intent upon being understood. ‘I’m not saying it’s gospel. All I’m saying is there are certain statements made.’ ‘What statements?’ ‘That he joined the British army.’ ‘Johnny works in a factory stores. Lawn-mower parts.’ He nodded thoughtfully and slowly, as if agreeing. He was frowning a little, which he tended to when endeavouring to establish an accuracy. He liked to get things right. ‘It’d be a natural enough thing for him to keep it quiet about the army.’ ‘He has work in a stores.’ Her father continued to nod in the same slow fashion, and when he spoke the pace of his speech was unhurried also. He wondered, he remarked, where something without foundation would have come from, and added: ‘There’s better boys round here than that, girl. Irish boys belong in Ireland.’ ‘Johnny went to England because he couldn’t get work here.’ ‘A member of the British forces could be sent into the North. He could be set to killing our own.’ ‘Johnny’s not in any army. It’s someone else you heard about.’ ‘There’s plenty of decent Irish boys you could go to Sheehy’s public house with, girl. That’s all I’m saying to you.’ There was a silence in the kitchen then. Her father sat straight and upright in his chair, not doing anything with his hands, gazing in front of him at nothing. Felicia picked up another piece of brass. ‘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.

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 great-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.’ ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ ‘Not long now, Felicia. You’re jumpy, aren’t you?’ Again there is the smile, the small eyes glinting at her, clear behind the thick glass discs. This is a kind man, Felicia reflects through her apprehension, kinder than the desk sergeant of yesterday, who became impatient in the end. ‘God, here she is again,’ she heard him muttering when she returned to the police station in the hope that he might have come by some further information. ‘Anyone’d be nervy in the circumstances, Felicia. This chap’s a boyfriend, is he?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, there you are. Naturally you’d want to locate a boyfriend.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Family at arm’s length, eh? Boyfriend not approved?’ ‘My father’s against him.’ ‘It can be awkward when there’s that. In conversation with you, Felicia, you can sense a spot of bother. I thought it might be family.’ She explains about her father, how he has got it into his head that Johnny is in the British army, how her great-grandmother was left widowed by the Troubles when she was married only a month, how there is always that in the family, a feeling for that particular past. ‘He’d have told me if he was in the army.’ ‘Of course he would. And if he has steady work and isn’t some fly-by-night why should the family worry? If he’s your choice and if you’re his, why should they interfere?’ ‘My father’s unreasonable.’ ‘I know what you mean, Felicia. Some of the young squaddies I had under me in the regiment had a problem or two of a similar nature. Trouble over the girlfriend, family at arm’s length. I used to father the poor lads, if you get my meaning. I’d bring them back to the house and Ada’d give them tea and pies and cake, a whole spread she’d have. We never had kids of our own, a great disappointment to Ada and myself. Fond of the boyfriend, are you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Not hard to believe he’s fond of you.’ For a further hour the conversation continues. Felicia hears more about the regiment, and about the factories they pass near, how the motorways have changed the face of England, how new towns have come to these parts, how people from Pakistan and the West Indies have begun to settle, changing the look of things also, how prosperity has given way to poverty in certain areas. At ten to eight the little green car creeps cautiously into a factory car park. ‘Thanks very much indeed,’ Felicia says. ‘I’m not due at the hospital just yet.’ In the same cautious manner the car is driven to the edge of the car park; and Felicia is informed that you have to be careful in case you plank yourself down in a space that is reserved for management or where parking is forbidden. Before you know where you are you could find your head being chewed off by some officious attendant. ‘We’ll see everyone who arrives from here,’ the fat man adds. Most would come by car, he says, and there’ll probably be a couple of buses just before half past eight. If somehow they miss her friend she can always make inquiries at the security barrier. ‘I don’t want to keep you from the hospital.’ ‘Ada’d want me to give you what help I could. A young girl wandering isn’t recommended in this part of the world, you know. You hear shocking things sometimes.’ ‘It’s very nice of you.’ ‘She’s always worried about a young girl wandering. Well, I told you. It was Ada who said to find out about any works where mowers would be manufactured. It was her initiative. Well, being a woman, I suppose.’ ‘I hope she’s all right.’ ‘I’d go in and have a word only they don’t like you to bother the patients before the ops. Better not to cause an excitement, I think it is. You know how it is, Felicia, a patient might want to go to the toilet if she got worked up due to a visitor.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘They don’t like that before an op. I know it from sad experience.’ She nods, only half hearing what’s being said now that they have reached the factory. In the night she dreamed that her father called her a hooer again, and a soiled young bitch. Her mother was alive, saying she wouldn’t have believed it of her, striking her with her fists, saying it was she who should be dead. In her dream she could see the sprawl of the convent at the top of steep St Joseph’s Hill, and the Square with its statue of the gaitered soldier, and vegetables lank outside the shops in the summer heat. There was the chiming of the Angelus; turf smoke was pungent on the air. Her father said they wouldn’t be able to hold their heads up when the sniggering began in the back streets. Carmel and Rose talked about it in the Coffee Dock. ‘Here’s something now,’ her companion remarks when cars begin to arrive. She is advised to wind down her window to give herself a clearer view.

Buddy’s the cafe is called. An electrician is on a step-ladder, working at a fuse-box just below the ceiling. The ceiling is brown, stained with pools of a deeper brown. Behind the bar where the tea and coffee and food come from there is a row of Pirelli calendars, half-dressed models in provocative poses. An old man is smoking and reading the sports news in the Sun at a table in a corner. ‘I think a coffee,’ Mr Hilditch requests. ‘Would you mind fetching me over a coffee, dear?’ He closes his eyes and keeps them closed until she returns. ‘Is something wrong?’ he hears her ask again. ‘Ada’s not so hot,’ he whispers, with his eyes still closed. ‘They did an emergency on her, five this morning. She’s not so good.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ ‘I’ll be all right in a minute.’ The first time he took Beth to the A361 Happy Eater he observed the woman at the till deciding that Beth was his daughter, and he laid his hand for a moment on Beth’s knee the way a father never would. He glanced in the direction of the till and the excitement began because the woman was still staring, deciding now that the relationship was different. ‘I’m sorry,’ this present girl is repeating, and Mr Hilditch opens his eyes. ‘You get a shock like this you don’t want to be alone. Both of us with a shock, Felicia.’ Her red coat, unbuttoned in the cafe, has fallen back, and for the first time he sees the other clothes she is wearing: a navy-blue skirt and a red knitted jumper. Her hair has gone lank, the rims of her eyes have recovered a bit. She still wears the little cross on a chain around her neck: a Catholic girl, Mr Hilditch speculates, which stands to reason, coming from where she does. ‘You’re pregnant,’ he says softly. ‘Yes.’ They sit in silence. In many ways, he considers, there is nothing as tasty as a toasted bacon sandwich. Sometimes you find a café like this won’t do you one, but this morning they’ve struck lucky. Bacon sandwich’s, a handwritten sign advertises. ‘I think you should have something to eat, Felicia.’ ‘I’m not hungry.’ A mouthful or two is a comfort in distress, he quietly explains, better for you than a coffee on its own. They sit in silence again. He finishes the coffee she bought and rises to get them some more. ‘Mine was tea,’ she says. ‘Not a coffee, dear?’ ‘Coffee doesn’t agree with me at the moment.’ ‘Ah yes, of course.’ He pushes himself to his feet and goes to the counter. ‘Two bacon sandwiches,’ he orders from a small Indian woman, no taller than a dwarf, he considers. ‘A tea for my girlfriend and a coffee for myself.’ He smiles at the woman, knowing that the smile cannot be seen by the Irish girl. ‘Look lovely, those bacon sandwiches you do.’ The woman doesn’t acknowledge that. Often they don’t. He counts out one pound fifty-four, recalling an occasion when he was seated beside an Indian woman in a cinema and tried to strike up a conversation but she rudely moved away. Younger than the one serving him, she’d been on her own or else he’d never have presumed. ‘Sugar for the tea?’ he inquires. ‘My girlfriend likes a spoon of sugar.’ A sachet of sugar is thrown on to the counter and then, at last, there is a flicker of interest. Still not responding to his smile, the Indian woman notices the girl in the red jumper and for a passing instant – he’s certain of it – considers their relationship. He nods, confirming what he believes the woman’s speculation to be. They’re having a day out, he confides, his fiancée and himself. ‘You’ll find your friend,’ he says when he returns to the table. ‘If we failed at the factory, Ada said to me last night, we’ll find him where his abode is.’ ‘I thought I might run into him on the street. I didn’t realize the town would be so big.’ ‘Of course you didn’t. It’s understandable, that.’ ‘The town I come from myself –’ ‘It would be smaller, of course it would.’ Mr Hilditch inclines his head understandingly. Naturally it wouldn’t be the size of an English town, he agrees, you wouldn’t expect that. He wonders if the girl is religious since she’s a Catholic. It would account for a lot if she turned out to be religious, like Jakki was. She says again she’s sorry about his wife. ‘You don’t mind keeping me company for just a few more minutes? Only she’s dozy at the moment and they said best I should go. I told them I had a friend in the car and they said I’d be better off in the company of a friend.’ Mr Hilditch risks the shadow of a smile. ‘To tell the truth, it lifts my mind, just sitting here with a friend.’ He lets another silence gather. He likes to look at something tasty before he takes the initial bite: he was no more than five or six when that was first noticed in him. He likes to think about it. ‘Eat up, dearie,’ his mother used to press. ‘Mustn’t be a Mr Dawdle.’ ‘I have to tell you, Felicia, it isn’t a bolt out of the blue. A shock certainly, but not a bolt from the blue.’ She nods. She begins to say something. He watches her changing her mind. ‘ “I’ll maybe not come out,” she said on the way over last night. She faced it months ago. We all face it one day, Felicia.’ She nods again, at a loss for words, as any girl would be. There is a tiny dimple, almost unnoticeable, that comes and goes in one of her cheeks, affected by her change of expression. ‘I’m glad you’re going to have a baby, Felicia. It’s a help to me, that.’ ‘A help?’ ‘Another life coming. Ada going in at this particular time and you being here, and Ada concerned about you when 1 told her. A young Irish girl, I said, and she asked me what you looked like.’ She doesn’t comment on that. He bites into the crisp toast of his sandwich, savouring the chewy bacon and the saltiness. ‘Don’t you want the baby, Felicia?’ ‘I don’t know what to do until I find him.’ Again she struggles with tears, and then pulls herself together. ‘The father’s the young man we’re looking for, Felicia?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘To tell you the truth, I thought there might be something like that.’ ‘I don’t want to bother you with it.’ ‘Another person’s trouble can lift the mind, Felicia.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You understand me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I’ll drive you back when I’ve been to the hospital again.’ She says there is no need. She says she’ll maybe go out to the factory and make sure there hasn’t been a mistake. He shakes his head. ‘I don’t think there was a mistake, dear.’ The Indian woman is engaged in a shrill conversation on the telephone. Neither the electrician nor the old man in the corner has displayed any interest in them, but then they wouldn’t, people like that. Another thing is, the condition she is in hardly shows; you can tell all right, but it has to catch your eye. If she were bigger it might be a different kettle of fish, with the Indian woman noticing and speculating further. ‘Ada’d like to know I was still keeping an eye on you.’ ‘Will you be all right yourself?’ He shakes his head. You couldn’t be all right in circumstances like these, no one could. Finishing the second bacon sandwich, he wipes his fingertips with a paper napkin. ‘What I’m thinking of is your condition, Felicia. I’m just thinking that walking about with those carriers mightn’t be a help.’ To his surprise, she appears to lose track of the conversation.

Waking at ten past seven, her black nakedness clad in a frilled red nightdress, Miss Calligary is aware all over again that Miss Tamsel Flewett has walked away. Miss Tamsel Flewett has gone and will not return: Miss Calligary has lain in her bed with that glum reflection, before rising and washing the walls of her room and of the communal bathroom and lavatory. It is her practice to wash something when discontent assails her, discontent being a snare. The dull flow of time while she scrubs and cleanses is soothing; peace will return. While she works she hears the people of the Gathering House going out, one by one or in groups, setting forth on their day’s business. Then, without Miss Tamsel Flewett, who has accompanied her on her own business for the past seven and a half months, she goes out herself, her territory this morning the new Brunel estate. ‘I don’t want nothing,’ an old white woman protests when Miss Calligary rings the first doorbell. ‘Of course you don’t.’ Miss Calligary is soothing, shaking her head as she speaks. ‘Course not, honey.’ ‘What’s all this then?’ ‘Usually I come by with a young friend, Miss Tamsel Flewett, because sometimes a Jamaican lady on her own don’t go down too good. But today Miss Tamsel Flewett cannot be with us. May I inquire if you read the Bible?’ ‘The what?’ ‘The Bible, honey. Today I have brought the Bible to you. For instance, do you ever consider the future there is for the one who dies?’ ‘Are you from the Security?’ Miss Calligary says she isn’t. But nevertheless she brings security with her – security of mind and heart, security of purpose. ‘What’s this about dying then? We all have to die, stands to reason.’ ‘I’ve come this morning to talk with you about that.’ ‘There’s Gloria Live coming to an end. I was watching Gloria when you rang on the bell.’ The old woman is slightly humped, small and wrinkled, with sparse grey hair. She hasn’t a use for a Bible, she states; if she had a use for a Bible she would buy one in a shop. Miss Calligary ignores that. She says: ‘In busy times there isn’t always the opportunity to think about the future there is for the one who dies.’ The old woman shakes her head. Dish of the Day is starting, she points out. ‘Could I perhaps step in?’ Miss Calligary smiles a wide, brilliant smile. ‘Ten minutes out of your day, that’s all I’ll take, honey.’ She had the waterbed man the day before, the old woman replies. She doesn’t want a waterbed; she doesn’t even know what a waterbed is. She says she has enjoyed their chat, and makes to close the door, but Miss Calligary’s elbow obstructs the motion. ‘For the one who dies the future is wonderful. That is the Message I bring you this morning. Our Father Lord’s purpose is for a paradise earth. Our Father Lord’s promise is for life without end. In return only for obedience. I’m not endeavouring to interest you in a waterbed.’ ‘Happen you’ve come to the wrong house. Number 5 this is. Mrs Crimms I am.’ ‘Mrs Crimms, it’s not by chance that a Message is brought to you. I am here to gather, to gather you and other good folks in. Take a minute to consider, Mrs Crimms, that we awake in the morning and survey the day. We all do that, Mrs Crimms, you and I and the whole wide world of mankind. At night we look back into the day that has passed. Each night of our life there is a day that is passed into the darkness of this night. But if there has been no brightness we do not bow our heads.’ I don’t want no Bible.’ ‘I’m not selling Bibles, honey. The Task that is given to me is to gather folks in. “Shall we gather at the river?” is the words that I am saying to you.’ ‘I’m missing Dish of the Day.’ ‘We’ll watch Dish of the Day first, Mrs Crimms. We’ll watch Dish of the Day without a single word spoken. The heavens are my throne, is what is written for today. The earth is my footstool. I shall glorify the very place of my feet. You stand to gain, Mrs Crimms.’ This final statement has the desired effect, and so Mrs Crimms’ small sitting-room is glorified, while cooking takes place on her television. And when the programme ends Miss Calligary explains how Mrs Crimms may be released from the inevitability of death, and Mrs Crimms speaks of her son, Rod, who is in gaol. She has twenty-two grandchildren, Mrs Crimms reveals; all of them born to the same son’s three wives. Rod hasn’t had luck with his wives, she divulges, weeping as she recalls that. Eighteen months he got the last time, for a thing he never did. ‘I would speak with Rod,’ Miss Calligary offers. ‘I would take the Message to him.’ ‘Twenty-two kids and not one of them lifts a finger to bother with him. Rod never had luck.’ ‘I would bring your son reading matter,’ Miss Calligary promises. ‘I would convey letters and parcels, I would gather Rod in. My Church thinks in terms of families.’ Mrs Crimms repeats that she has twenty-two grandchildren. All kinds of work they are in. ‘A garage, then again computers, then again a Payless and on the buses. Another’s in refuse.’ ‘Pass on to your grandchildren the Message I bring to you today, honey. When you read the words I am leaving with you you’ll discover that the Father Lord makes all things new. You’ll discover your life without end, and your son and your grandchildren will discover theirs. Out of the abundance of His love, the Father Lord lent His Son, that the world of mankind might be brightened, as lightning brightens His sky. ‘Poor Rod’s in the Scrubs.’ ‘I’d go to the Scrubs. I wouldn’t hesitate.’ But Mrs Crimms does not appear to be much interested in this offer. Vaguely she shakes her head. It is time for Henry Kelly’s game show. She likes a game show best. ‘You have rooms going spare in your house.’ Miss Calligary speaks softly, smiling and seeking to make eye contact. ‘In the springtime the folk come for our Prayer Jubilee. From the far corners of the earth folk come and we need more beds and bedding, and the use of bathroom and kitchen and all that.’ Mrs Crimms turns up the volume of the television and Miss Calligary’s promise that she will return in a day or two is lost in the tumult. On the street outside the roar of the game show continues, and then abruptly ceases as the volume is reduced. Plenty of room in that house, Miss Calligary says to herself as she continues on her way, obedient to her Task. All that morning blank faces stare back at her animated presence, at her smile and the vigour in her eyes. She taught Miss Tamsel Flewett to be cheerful no matter what their reception was. Two smiles are better than one, she used to say, and this morning it is lonely. At door after door she explains that she conveys the Message of the Church of the Gatherers, but she receives in return only rebukes for her folly. It is then, when her spirits are low, that she notices a girl in a red coat on an isolated seat in a walkway, with litter blowing all around her. Miss Calligary observes this figure from a distance, noting the two green-and-black carrier bags and the tired hunch of the girl’s shoulders. There is unhappiness here, Miss Calligary silently remarks to herself, and strides forth to gather the girl in.

Mr Hilditch has seen them about: nutters, is his view. He has noticed them on the streets, imposing their literature on people, bothering people with religious talk. Somehow or other the girl has become entangled with them; certainly she’s lodging in their house because he has seen her entering it. An innocent girl from the bogs of Ireland, susceptible to any suggestion they’d make: what chance would she have under pressure like that? The only consolation is that the house she’s in is well away from the Old Hinley Road barracks, two miles at least, maybe two and a half. The lads from the barracks use the Goose and Gander, and Hinley Fish ‘n’ Chips at the Stoat roundabout, or else the Queen’s Head down Budder way. Mr Hilditch remembers that from the Elsie Covington days, when a young thug from the barracks had her out a couple of times. The area isn’t part of the town, never was. Apart from the barracks, there’s nothing much doing there: weekends or a heavy night out, the squaddies are on the motorway down to Brum. Mr Hilditch plays ‘Falling in Love Again’ on his gramophone, then ‘Stella by Starlight’ and ‘Makin’ Whoopee’. The records are old seventy-eights: being an antique, the gramophone doesn’t play anything else. Mr Hilditch relaxes in an armchair, the Daily Telegraph – all of it read – on the carpet beside him, the melodies a solace in his worry about the well-being of the girl he has befriended. ‘Ev’ry rolling stone gets to feel alone,’ sings Doris Day, ‘When home sweet home is far away.’ Mr Hilditch calls this room his big front room, the expression used privately to himself because there never has been a call to use it to anyone else. The oil paintings of other people’s ancestors gaze benignly down at him. His billiard table, rarely used, is in a corner; a cabinet contains someone else’s collection of paperweights. Two grandfather clocks, wound every Thursday evening and adjusted daily, tick agreeably, one between the heavily curtained windows, the other by the door. On the black marble mantelpiece, above a mammoth electric fire with glowing coals, there are china mugs, and ornaments: a seal balancing a ball, ballet dancers, a comic orchestra of Dalmatians, highland cattle. The room’s wallpaper is mainly crimson, roses on a trellis. Books of military history, back numbers of the National Geographic magazine, bound volumes of Punch and the Railway and Travel Monthly fill a bookcase. ‘Never thought my heart could be so yearny,’ sings Doris Day. ‘Why did I decide to roam?’ The song concludes and the needle whines softly as the record continues to revolve. It’s a pleasant sound, Mr Hilditch considers and listens to it lazily, much calmer now than when he entered the room an hour ago. Tomorrow he’ll try again for an encounter.

Mr Hilditch draws up the figures for the January expenditure and canteen takings, spreading the monthly subsidy lightly in the hope of holding on to a bit extra for February. At four o’clock a vending-machine representative begins his sales pitch: install a bank of food machines in the canteen and you dispense with all canteen staff. The machines would back directly on to the kitchens, the prepared portions loaded straight into them: at the drop of a coin the dishes would emerge when and how they’re required, piping hot or chilled. Drinks likewise: load the machines with the necessary ingredients – tea, coffee, chocolate, softs, no more than ten minutes’ labour a day. ‘You can’t lose, Mr Hilditch,’ the vending man assures him, but Mr Hilditch has no intention of making a change. He likes the old ways. He likes to see his canteen staff, the women’s hair tied up under their caps, the chatter and bustle of the queues, steam rising from the pans, mashed potato scooped up, an extra spoonful of sprouts jollied out of the server. Yet in spite of this preference he is always prepared to see a catering representative in the lull of the afternoon. He enjoys the interruption, a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits shared. He feels it gives a shape to the day. Tomorrow the Colman’s mustard man is due. These passing days are shaped in another way also: with speculation, with reassurance following doubt, with the steadying of his thoughts. The unknown factor is how much money she retained in her handbag, how long she can manage to keep going. The nag is that while she’s hanging about on the streets there’s the danger of her running into the boyfriend. Added to which it could dawn on her at any moment that there might be something, after all, in her father’s astute suspicions: anyone she cares to ask would direct her to the barracks. Driving home on the evening of the vending salesman’s visit, Mr Hilditch shakes his head with renewed finality: all that is a chance that has to be taken. What matters more is that she’s still around, and is likely to be. But that night, having deadlocked his front door and shot the bolts at the back, Mr Hilditch mounts his stairs feeling nervous in case he has let everything slip away from him. In the days that have passed since his sighting of the girl she could have stumbled on her quarry. At this very moment he could be making a clean breast of his deception, buttering her up with devious excuses. At this very moment she could be getting herself up the pole all over again. Savagely Mr Hilditch brushes his teeth, painfully attacking his lower gum as he reflects on the way the world is these days: crazy God-botherers enticing young girls, lying thugs taking advantage, you name it and it’s there. GP Ruined my Sex Life! says Boob-Op Fourteen-Year-Old Mum. Dog-Collar Dougie Had Sofa Sex with my Pal for Revenge! Kids in Black Mass Sacrifices! The headlines race through Mr Hilditch’s memory, culled from the newspapers he sometimes carries away from the canteen because he likes to see it tidy. Every day of the week, seemingly, cigarettes are stubbed out on the flesh of infants. Every day of the week women in their nineties suffer rape and violence. Flaming petrol is poured through letter-boxes for the fun of it. Cars are stolen, televisions are stolen. Company directors spend their employees’ pensions on motor yachts. Drug addicts get their fixes over the counter in Boot’s. Teenage girls are set alight on city wastelands. Mr Hilditch cools his face with water. Calm again, in bed, he recalls an evening with Bobbi in the Welcome Spoon at Legge’s Corner near Junction 18. They sat for hours, maybe even three, while she poured out her troubles, in much the same way as the Irish one has. ‘You wouldn’t credit half of it,’ Bobbi said: the abuse she received at the hands of the man her mother took in after her father went off; the home she spent six months at, where men in belted overcoats arrived at weekends intent on the same. With Bobbi’s almost pretty face for company, Mr Hilditch drops off. The following evening, distancing himself equally from his place of work and Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road, Mr Hilditch drives to a supermarket where he is not known. He purchases hairnets and tights and women’s underclothes, talcum powder and skin cream. Already, at a Saturday jumble sale, he has selected outer garments and two hats. After he has eaten, he arranges these articles about the house, filling a wardrobe with coats and skirts and dresses, and drawers with underclothes which he takes the trouble to crumple up, even to tear a little. He half empties bottles of lotions and squeezes cream from tubes. He packs the talcum powder, with lipstick and eye make-up, into the bathroom cabinet. He drapes the tights over the rails of the ceiling-drier in the kitchen. He locks away his spike of receipts, and any envelopes and papers that bear his name, old cheque-books and bank statements. When Mr Hilditch’s mother died he sold her belongings to a clothes dealer who sent in a card, but he later discovered that the cardboard box he’d filled with her shoes had been overlooked. Planning to dispose of these on some future occasion, he stored them in an outside shed. On the kitchen table he wipes off the mildew and later arranges them in a row by the side of the wardrobe.

Mr Hilditch is in his big front room. ‘Blue Hawaii’ is playing. The Daily Telegraph is limp on his knees. When the doorbell sounds he doesn’t move. He knows she won’t go away, she’ll ring again. When she does he rises slowly and crosses the hall at the same leisurely pace, all the nagging doubts he has experienced dissipating so swiftly that they have gone completely by the time he reaches the door. ‘Blue Hawaii’ has come to an end, but he continues the tune with his breath, passing it softly over his lower teeth. He raises a hand to the mourning tie he’s wearing, straightening it before he opens the door. ‘We meet again,’ he says, his smile agreeable. Mr Hilditch doesn’t press his visitor to enter his house. He stands on the doorstep with her, having to peer at her because it is dark. He recalls as a child trying to entice a mouse into a trap that was made like a cage. You put the cheese down and then go away. Every day you put the cheese down a little closer to the metal wire and in the end the mouse goes in of its own accord, confident that it knows what’s what. ‘You’ve had no luck in your searchings?’ Mr Hilditch speaks coolly, not wishing to give the impression of any satisfaction on his part. He listens while he’s told that the Irish girl has been all over the place. He leaves it to her to tell her story. ‘I’ve had my money stolen.’ ‘Stolen?’ ‘Well, it disappeared. It was hidden away in one of my carriers and when I looked it wasn’t there.’ ‘You’ve been in doubtful company, have you?’ He listens while he’s told about the religious house, and then contributes the view that any kind of fanatic isn’t to be trusted. The Irish girl says she doesn’t know what to do. She has been in other bed-and-breakfast places, she says. ‘How long have you got?’ Mr Hilditch pats his stomach. ‘You know.’ ‘I’m four months gone.’ ‘It hardly shows. Just a little. Just beginning to.’ ‘You said could you – you said could you help me that day…’ She begins to stutter, then steadies herself. ‘I was wondering…’ Again she breaks off, and he nods to encourage her. ‘I was wondering if you could lend me the fare to go home.’ The stutter sets in again when she tries to say it’s a cheek asking a stranger. She says she doesn’t know where to turn. ‘You want to go back?’ ‘It was a mistake coming over here, I shouldn’t ever have come over.’ ‘What about your friend though?’ ‘I’ll never find him.’ When the girl says that Mr Hilditch realizes she has lost heart. In spite of his reservations, he should have approached her again when he saw her on the street. It may now be too late: from his experience he knows that once they get a notion into their heads it isn’t easy to disabuse them of it. If she feels she has turned up every stone, that may simply be that. Mr Hilditch is aware of a coldness in his stomach, the feeling that something he considered to be his may be clawed away from him. Alert to the danger, he speaks deliberately and slowly, simulating a calmness that does not reflect this inner tumult. ‘The irony is, if your friend knew all this he’d be doing his nut with worry. I’ve had experience of that. If he knew what you’ve been through, all the hoo-ha at home and then looking for him in a country that’s strange to you, the poor fellow’d be beside himself.’ There are tears then, as he suspected there might be. It’s all down to the boyfriend’s mother, he hears again, and experiences a measure of relief, he’s not sure why. He listens while it is repeated that the mother wrote lies in a letter; that she said don’t come at Christmas, inventing some reason or other. ‘Do you know that for a fact, Felicia? Have you heard from someone it was the mother?’ ‘It was her. I’d swear to it now.’ ‘So you’ve heard from no one back home since you got here?’ ‘No one knows where I am.’ ‘But they know you came after Johnny?’ ‘Only she knows the town he’s in.’ ‘And of course she wouldn’t tell him you’d taken off. Naturally.’ ‘No, she wouldn’t.’ She mentions a loan again, embarrassed, as she was before. She mentions the sum that is necessary, which she has calculated. He doesn’t respond directly, but says: ‘It doesn’t seem a pity to you to give up so easily? Since you’ve come so far with so much at stake? For starters, will they welcome you back?’ She has her carrier bags with her and hasn’t put them down. ‘I’d rather find Johnny,’ she whispers, sobs catching on the words. ‘Only I never will now.’ ‘What I’m thinking is, after all you’ve been through maybe we should make one last effort. D’you understand me, Felicia? I could ask the girl in the office to ring round like I suggested to you. D’you remember I suggested that, Felicia? If Johnny said a lawnmower works, it must be there somewhere.’ She shakes her head, wiping her nose with a tissue. ‘I must have got it wrong.’ Slowly he shakes his head also. ‘Just an hour or two it would take, nothing great. That girl’s smart, she knows a thing or two. Another thing is, there’s places I’ve heard of where the Irish boys meet up of an evening. For instance, the Blue Light. Have you checked out the Blue Light at all?’ She says she hasn’t and he puts it to her that it could be worth looking at, it and a couple of other places. Just to make sure before she throws in the sponge. ‘It was understandable, you scuttling off like that the other week, dear. I passed that incident on to Ada when she had a bright moment and she said it was understandable. I only mention it because I wouldn’t want you to think there was offence taken.’ ‘Is your wife getting better?’ ‘Ada died, dear.’ Her hand goes to her mouth, a swift, uneasy motion. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ The words come out in a rush, with a hint of the stutter again. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ ‘Three nights ago.’ He lets a silence develop, since one is called for. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he continues eventually, ‘we have to say a blessed release. We have to use that expression, Felicia.’ He can sense her trying to make a response, but she cannot find the words. He senses what she’s thinking. She’s thinking that you get caring and kindness from a person who has worries of his own and you turn your back on him in his moment of need. All he asked for that day was a couple of hours’ company, the only request he made. ‘Well, I’ll say good-night.’ He hesitates, experiencing an impulse to recall ‘Blue Hawaii’, to breathe it soundlessly over his lower teeth. ‘Unless you’d care for a beverage of some sort?’ he offers, resisting this urge to honour the melody. ‘You’d be welcome of course. I’m making tea.’ After a moment’s hesitation on her part also, she mounts the steps to the hall door.

‘Morning, Mr Hilditch!’ a man with a bad leg calls out on the forecourt, one of the canteen cleaners. ‘Morning, Jimmy. Better spot of weather, eh?’ ‘Does your heart good, Mr Hilditch.’ The drizzly weather of the last day or two has passed on; it’s frosty now, with a clear sky. Rissoles in batter it is today, or pork roast or fish; prunes and custard or roly-poly: the Thursday menu. He’ll probably go for the rissoles, with french fries and mushy peas, unless the roast tastes special, which once in a while it does. ‘Morning, Mr Hilditch,’ someone else calls out from a distance, and he smiles and waves. It seems extraordinary that he is greeted as he usually is. It seems extraordinary that no one looks differently at him on the forecourt, or in the kitchens when he enters them ten minutes later, or through the glass of the offices adjacent to his own. Mr Hilditch finds it hard to believe that none of these people is aware that less than eight hours ago, at twenty past one in the morning, standing in his own hallway, he issued the invitation he did and as a consequence has an unknown Irish girl under his roof. All your adult life you live to a rule. Every waking minute you take full precautions on account of wagging tongues. Then, in a single instant, you let it all go. Not once did he experience an urge to take Beth or Elsie Covington, or any of the others, under his roof. Never before has he made reference to a wife, or spoken of a wedding with regimental traditions, and swords. There has never been a call for anything more than the meetings, the hours spent together, and people noticing where it was safe for people to notice. Last night in that Little Chef a woman collecting used dishes definitely muttered something to another woman, and both of them looked across to where the Irish girl was shaking her head after he’d drawn her attention to a young man who’d just entered the place. Clearly the two women had established that she was pregnant. It still hardly shows, but women can tell the way a man isn’t able to, as he knows from what is sometimes passed on to him in the canteen. He even put it to her; something about a woman’s perception, making conversation. Shivering through him, akin to the fever that accompanies a bout of flu, the excitement that began as a tick of pleasure in the Blue Light fish bar became intense when later he stood with the Irish girl in the hallway, her carrier bags waiting for her to pick up, the little metal cross just visible at her neck. He invited her under his roof because he was impelled to do so, just as he’d been impelled to take Gaye’s arm as they were leaving Pam’s Pantry at the Creech Wood Services – a premature action because it was the first time they’d gone out together. Yet he couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d tried, even though Creech Wood wasn’t far enough away, not by a good twenty miles. Two minutes later, in the car park, he noticed a man who looked like Bellis from the spraying sheds, and tightness knotted in his stomach, a warmth becoming icy. ‘Your daughter, Mr Hilditch?’ he imagined the man saying the next time they met in the canteen; and having to shake his head, saying he’d never been at Creech Wood Services in his life. But to his vast relief he was mistaken: the man was someone else. To be seen by the wrong pair of eyes when you’d linked arms with a friend seems a little thing now; tiny compared with it being known that you’ve taken a girl under your roof. For the first time in his adult life the sensation of risk feels attractive, and instinctively he is aware that this is because the risk he has taken is so great. It seems to Mr Hilditch, also, that he has been journeying for a long time to the destination he has reached, that all his previous actions have lacked the panache of the one that has brought him here. The Irish girl spent the night in his big front room, saying she’d be all right there, although he offered her a room with a bed in it upstairs. She lay down on the sofa, where he saw her when he tiptoed downstairs before he retired himself. As he recollects her shadowy, sleeping form now, Mr Hilditch knows that that sofa will never be the same for him again. Already this girl has used the forks and spoons he uses himself, and used the toilet and maybe has had a stríp wash. ‘Make yourself an egg or two,’ he said before he left, ‘if you’re peckish later on, Felicia.’ She is welcome to all he has. The morning passes slowly for Mr Hilditch, a difficult time to concentrate. He knows he can trust this girl. He knows she will stay in the house, not venturing to the shrubberies or the backyard because he has said it’s best she shouldn’t. She will be careful at the windows, keeping well back although they’re only partially visible from the road; in particular she will keep clear of the downstairs windows in case some deliverer of junk mail chances to glance in. Yet even so, naturally, he is nervous. It would be agreeable to draw things out, to drive off this evening in another direction, to sit down again with her in the kitchen for a late-night snack after they’ve visited a few more cafés. But he can tell she’s not in the mood any more for drawing things out; she has given up and she’s beginning to be edgy. Again Mr Hilditch sees himself in the waiting-room of the Gishford Clinic, murmuring to her that she mustn’t worry. There has never been anything like that either, nothing even approaching it. ‘Keeping fit, Mr Hilditch?’ is a query at lunchtime in the canteen. ‘Fine, thanks. Yourself?’ Some reply is made; Mr Hilditch hides his lack of interest beneath a smile. Surely the Asian woman dishing out mushy peas can tell he’s not as he was yesterday? How can there fail to be something in his expression reflecting the frisson of unease that caused him to remain awake all night just because she was under his roof, only a flight of stairs separating them? ‘Oh, what a timid one you are!’ his mother used to say when he was six. He smiles again, pleased that the remark has come back to him. He thanks the Asian woman and picks up his tray, not feeling timid in the least. She’ll maybe be turning the pages of a Geographic now. She’s different from the others, nothing tough about her. Simple as a bird, which you’d expect her to be of course, coming from where she does. And yet, of course, they’re all the same. The truth stares out at them and they avert their eyes. Beth, with her extra glass or two, couldn’t tolerate it for an instant; Elsie had made herself immune to it by the time she hit the streets. The more lies they are told the more they tell them to themselves – Jakki about her so-called company director, Sharon up the garden path with the dry cleaner, father of five. The first time he met up with Bobbi she had a black eye: from walking into a door edge, she said. ‘What would I go for, Mr Hilditch?’ an employee whose name he can’t recollect wants to know, and he advises the pork because of the crackling. ‘Happen I will, Mr Hilditch. Looks champion, that pork, eh?’ She’s maybe having her boiled eggs now. She maybe put on ‘Lazy River’ in the big front room and the melody comes softly to the kitchen. Curiosity has drawn her upstairs, to the dresses hanging in the wardrobe, and the shoes on the linoleum beside it. ‘Third extractor’s clogged, Mr Hilditch,’ someone reports later that afternoon, and he can hardly tell if it’s a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter anyway, some shadow in an overall such as they all wear, some covering on the head by European law. ‘Dearie me,’ he responds, as he always does in a calamity. He watches while a crowd gathers round the faulty extractor, Len from the finishing shed who’s always called in for this kind of repair, and most of the kitchen staff. ‘I think you’ll find us competitive,’ the Crosse and Blackwell’s rep contends later still, in the office. ‘Grossed up, I’d say those terms are out of competition’s reach.’ It’s not of interest; it doesn’t matter. A clogged extractor or bargain prices, how can any of it compare with a runaway from the Irish boglands passing through the rooms of his house, a girl with a cross on a cheap metal chain? ‘Excuse me a minute,’ he apologizes to the Crosse and Blackwell’s man, and telephones the Gishford Clinic from the staff call-box outside the canteen. ‘Yes, we can arrange an immediate,’ a soothing voice assures him. Very civil, the place sounds, as Sharon said. ‘You give us a shout,’ the Crosse and Blackwell’s man invites when he returns to the office. ‘Any time you’ve thought it over.’ ‘Yes, I will.’ He shakes hands with the Crosse and Blackwell’s man, trying to remember his name. ‘Always good to see you, Mr Hilditch.’ ‘And yourself.’ Pregnant in his house, examining his mother’s likeness draped in mourning on the dining-room mantelpiece, going from room to room upstairs, eventually at her strip wash. Mr Hilditch drops the lids over his eyes in the hope that the images will intensify. He turns his head away, taking off his spectacles for a moment to disguise his concentration on a private matter, while the Crosse and Blackwell’s man fastens his briefcase. ‘I’ll leave another card,’ the man says, placing the card on the edge of Mr Hilditch’s desk. ‘Just a reminder.’ Her clothes draped over the chair and the towel-rail in the bathroom: not since his mother was alive has there been anything like that in Number Three.

Magazines are on a square central table. The fitted carpeting is flecked, grey and brown. There are pale clean walls. Two different nurses keep passing through; and once a specialist, white jacket and trousers, short sleeves. Behind a glass window that slides open a staid receptionist is occupied at a desk. Classical music plays. Two girls wait also, one with a youth, the other alone. The one on her own leafs through Woman and Hello!, a tough-looking creature in Mr Hilditch’s opinion, with aluminium hair. The couple whisper. Mr Hilditch is certain that conclusions have already been reached in the waiting-room. Twice he has approached the staid receptionist, apologizing for doing so, seeking assurances that there are no complications. On both occasions she suggested he should go for a walk, or simply go home and return later, which is the more usual thing. ‘If you don’t mind, Nurse,’ he replied, the same words each time, ‘I’d prefer to be near my girlfriend.’ He could feel the youth thinking about both of them before they called her in: a man of fifty-four or -five, the youth was speculating, the kid no more than seventeen. When he called her darling, telling her not to worry, the youth heard every word. ‘Now then,’ a nurse with a mole says. ‘Miss Dikes?’ ‘It’s Mrs, actually,’ the youth sharply corrects her. The girl with him doesn’t move. ‘Go on, Nella,’ he urges in the same sharp voice. ‘You’ll be all right.’ ‘Just the prelim, Mrs Dikes,’ the nurse says. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ ‘I’ll come back in a while.’ The youth is on his feet also, halfway to the door. ‘I’d be grateful if you’d remain until the prelim’s complete, Mr Dikes,’ the nurse requests. The girl with the coloured hair reaches for another magazine, Out and Away. The youth raps on the glass of the receptionist’s window and when she slides it back he asks if there’s a coffee to be had. She closes her eyes briefly, snappishly. Coffee isn’t available. ‘Bloody marvellous.’ The youth addresses Mr Hilditch. ‘You pay through the bloody nose, you think they’d supply a coffee.’ ‘I imagine the young ladies get something. I imagine they’re well looked after, it being private.’ ‘We had the dosh put aside for Torremolinos, but there you go. Nella wouldn’t touch the other. Gets around, she says, if you go on the public, and she don’t want that. The wife’s far on, is she? Don’t look it to me.’ ‘No, she’s not far on.’ Mr Hilditch pauses. ‘Actually, she’s not my wife.’ The girl with the coloured hair looks up from her magazine, interested now. ‘Girlfriend,’ Mr Hilditch says, and when a second specialist, smaller and bald, enters the waiting-room and raps on the receptionist’s glass, Mr Hilditch hopes the youth will ask another question so that the specialist and the receptionist can be drawn in. But the youth says nothing further and the bald specialist requests that when the eleven-fifteen appointment arrives he is to be informed immediately. ‘Cut it a bit fine, the eleven-fifteen has,’ he comments, hurrying away again, and Mr Hilditch smiles and catches his eye. It is then that the excitement begins, creeping through him, like something in his blood. He is the father of an unborn child, no doubt in any of their minds. The girl they have all seen, who was here not ten minutes ago, whey-faced and anxious, is at this very moment being separated from their indiscretion. A relationship has occurred, no way can you gainsay it. That he is an older man is just fact. Girls can take to an older man, they can take to a stout man: it’s a natural thing; it isn’t peculiar, it isn’t wrong. ‘You’re never that big boy’s mother!’ people used to say, the other way round then; strangers would say it when they were out somewhere, down town or at the Spa they went to. Funny if she were here now, Mr Hilditch reflects; funny if she came back from the dead. Mr Hilditch closes his eyes and the indiscretion that occurred is there, an episode in his car. It’s dark; they can’t see one another; nothing could be nicer, the Irish girl is whispering to him; she wants to be with him for ever. In the waiting-room a tremor afflicts him, a slight thing, nothing serious: he has experienced this before. It’s in his legs and then his arms; he steadies the quivering it causes in his hands by pressing the tips of his fingers into his knees. He would like to rest for a moment, to close his eyes again, but he does not do so. He smiles in order to control the quivering when it affects his lips, hoping it will not be taken as untoward that he should smile at this time.

The watch is her father’s. She sits among the daisies, waiting for him while he looks for it. She arranges the pink flowers on a dock leaf and they are strawberries on a plate and it is a party except that no one comes to it but herself. The dandelions are another fruit, maybe pears, she doesn’t know. ‘Crickets talk with their legs,’ her father says when he comes back. The watch always dangles into his top pocket, only it wasn’t there when he looked. He took it off to keep it by him, so that he’d know the time when his jacket was off. He drooped the watch-chain over a fallen branch and then walked away without it. ‘We’ll go and look,’ he said in the kitchen. Her mother was there too. A Sunday because they’d all been to Mass. It’s too hot where she is so he says go under the tree. His grandfather’s the watch was, brought back from Dublin the time his grandfather was killed by the soldiers. ‘It won’t take long,’ someone else says. ‘Try and relax now.’ It’s when he worked for the Mandevilles, before he worked for the nuns. ‘There it is,’ he says. ‘Right as rain.’ There is music a long way off, a man singing and the music. ‘That’s Felicia, ma’am,’ her father says, and a tall woman bends down and holds her hand out. ‘Shake hands with Mrs Mandeville, Felicia.’ But she doesn’t want to, and the woman laughs. She has smooth hair drawn back from her face, and trousers. ‘Felicia’s a nice name,’ she says. A white dog sniffs her foot and she cries. The tall woman puts a finger into the dog’s mouth to show it won’t bite. The music is still playing, and the voice is singing. ‘Look, Felicia,’ her father says, and she sees people sitting on chairs in front of a house, a man and another woman and a boy. The music is coming from there. ‘John Count,’ her father says. The house is green, a big square house. The bottom of a curtain has blown out of an open window and trails on the windowsill, white net on green. The hall door is open as wide as it will go, darkness inside. Tall Mrs Mandeville walks with the dog behind her, going slowly towards the chairs, her footsteps sounding on the gravel, silent on the grass. There is a rattle of plates and cups when the music ceases. In a shed in the garden her father shows her the garden tools he uses. He tells her what each is called: rake, fork, shears, spade, hoe. This is where he spends his days. He shows her a bird’s nest in the roof of the shed, and lifts her up to see speckled green eggs. ‘Isn’t that a queer thing?’ he says. They pick bluebells to bring back. She can hear the music again, but it’s different now. Jazz, her father says, the music of the southern American negro. ‘A black man that is, Felicia. Black all over.’ It’s hot when they come out of the wood where the bluebells are, she can feel it on her head. Her father takes one hand and she holds the bluebells in the other. The hinge on the watch is faulty, he says, he must get it fixed in MacSweeney’s. ‘Aren’t you the big girl now,’ he says, ‘able to be a companion on a Sunday?’ On the road they stop while he opens a packet of cigarettes. Sweet Afton he likes, but sometimes he’ll try another brand. He doesn’t smoke much, just now and then during the day. ‘Keep the midges off us,’ he says, lighting a match. He tells her about when he was small, as small as she is, and about how his own father had bare feet going to school. His own father and his mother are dead, but he still has his grandmother. They go into Lafferty’s shop and he has some of her lemonade because he is thirsty, too. He carries her on his shoulders and she can smell the tang of tobacco on him. ‘All done,’ someone says and it isn’t him, and there are lights and a smell that isn’t cigarettes, clean like Jeyes’ Fluid or the stuff when the sink’s blocked. The sheets are cool, a soreness is just beginning. ‘All done,’ someone says again; the fingers on her wrist have black hairs on them. ‘She can take herself off now,’ another voice says.

She’s there in the waiting-room, standing in front of him, white as a sheet. The youth who saved up to go to Torremolinos doesn’t pay any attention. There’s no one else in the waiting-room now except the receptionist behind her glass window. ‘Sit down a minute, dear,’ he says, and as he approaches the receptionist’s window it is drawn back. He pays in cash. ‘Thank you,’ he says to the woman. ‘We’re greatly obliged.’ ‘See she keeps warm.’ ‘We have a little journey and then I’ll tuck her up.’ The woman nods, glancing at him once. He can feel her wanting to ask if he’s the father, even though she must have clearly heard it when he said girlfriend. He says the word again, mumbling through the rest of the sentence because in the time he can’t think of anything coherent to say. He smiles at the receptionist. It could happen to a bishop, he wants to say, that expression of his Uncle Wilf’s. But already the glass has slid back into place.

No orders to attack the enemy were, however, given to the flotillas, and they therefore steamed passively along their course without instructions or information. Jellicoe’s signal to his flotillas was picked up by the German listening station at Neumünster, which reported to Scheer at 10.50 p.m. ‘Destroyers have taken up a position five sea miles astern of enemy’s main fleet.’ Abstractedly dwelling upon these facts, with the volume that contains them propped up in front of him, Mr Hilditch eats alone in his dining-room: a Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney pie with all the trimmings, a couple of slices of Mother’s Pride, pineapple chunks, condensed milk heated up, tea. His attention wanders from the sentences he peruses: the face of the youth in the waiting-room, and the faces of the staid receptionist and of the specialists and the aluminium-haired girl, crowd out the words. He sees, as clearly, the people in several Happy Eaters, in Little Chefs and Restful Trays, in the Dog and Grape and the other roadside public houses, the Blue Light fish bar, and Buddy’s Café. It is as it always is when an end has come: remembering is the best part in a way. He loads his fork with kidney, potato, and cauliflower in a white sauce. A couple of passers-by noticed them on the street, walking across the pavement to the car, passers-by who would naturally know what business was conducted at the Gishford. Thus the German Admiral, if the Neumünster message reached him, had from this time forward a fairly clear idea of the relative positions of the two fleets… Again Mr Hilditch’s concentration falters. When the second outburst occurred there’d been a wildness in the eyes that were reflected in the driving-mirror, and her fingers were groping at her forehead in agitation. At the time he’d again been endeavouring to establish if it had really been the recruiting sergeant, reflecting on the irony of the man being in the company of a bent-up elderly woman, while only yards away his own companion was a spry young Irish girl, the point he’d wanted to make to them in the car park. At about 10.30 p.m. the 4th German Scouting Group came in contact with the British 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron which was following our battlefleet. There was a violent explosion of firing… Once more the words are obscured by the remembered image in the driving-mirror. She took no notice when he pointed out that sitting up wasn’t good for her. She began about a living soul destroyed, then something to do with a slop bucket. He had to turn off at the Rywell Services, thinking it would be easier to reason with her if the car was stationary. By the time he’d parked and managed to get a look at her, the tears were flowing like a fountain, hysterical you’d have to call it. He got out and left her for a while, considering it better to let her get it out of her system on her own, but as soon as he returned to the car with some nourishment she started up again immediately. Mr Hilditch reaches out and closes the volume, then pushes it aside. There’s a pattern of faded orange flowers on her pale-blue nightdress, the material so flimsy you could hardly call it decent, her flesh showing through in places, white as her face. She shook her head over the sausages and bread he brought her an hour ago. But at least she is quieter now, sleep being a healer. Nylon the nightdress material is, Mr Hilditch supposes. When she pushed herself up in the bed a strap of the nightdress slipped from her shoulder. The outline of two slight breasts, like little sandcastles, showed beneath the flimsy covering. Mr Hilditch doesn’t wish to dwell upon what is coming into his mind now, but the recollection of the inadequate nightdress persists. In an effort to distract himself he pours condensed milk over the pineapple cubes, but the ploy doesn’t work. ‘Going out, dear?’ his mother said, turning from the looking-glass on her dressing-table, her hair already pinned up beneath the turban she wore at night. ‘Just for a while,’ he said, and she said surprising, at this hour. He could tell she knew, something in her eyes. He could tell she was pretending, the casual way she asked the question. In his dining-room Mr Hilditch pours tea into a cup he bought in a junk shop in Leighton Buzzard. It is cream-coloured, with a green band on the rim, matching two others on the kitchen dresser and the one that’s upstairs now, on the tray. He stirs in sugar and adds milk, then crosses to the door and listens. He moves from the room and stands for a moment at the bottom of the stairs, listening also. There is no sound. In the dining-room he sips his tea. ‘Quick time; lover?’ the professional offered and he said yes. She tucked her arm into his as they made their way to where he had left the car. Cathy her name was and he gave his as Colin. ‘Drive out a bit,’ she instructed, mentioning the money before he turned on the ignition, stating the sum. Her face had a sick tinge in the night light, a mouthful of bad teeth, drink on her breath. She shifted in the car seat, doing something to her clothing, and it was then that he wanted to be on the street with her again, noticed by the passers-by, as they’d been a moment ago. ‘Just talk, could we?’ he mumbled. ‘Fancy a tea?’ Another quid, she said, and brought him to an all-night transport place, where the lorry drivers addressed her by name. She said she was hungry; he went to get her something, and when he returned a lorry man rose from the chair that had been his. ‘See you, duck,’ the lorry man muttered to her. Mr Hilditch gathers up the dishes he has eaten from and carries them to the kitchen. ‘What’s with you?’ the professional asked, and he said nothing. ‘That it, is it?’ she asked. ‘That all, Colin?’ He didn’t say he hadn’t known when he approached her that that was all; he didn’t say anything, not feeling up to making a comment. ‘Any time, sunshine,’ she said. He drops the Fray Bentos tin into his garbage bucket and washes the dishes in the sink. He rinses the teapot and puts it to drain. He scours the potato saucepan and brushes away the faint scummy ring left by the cauliflower. He places what remains of the pineapple chunks and the condensed milk in the refrigerator. The professional had something wrong with her jaw, misshapen in some way. In his big front room he puts on ‘Besame Mucho’ and leaves the door open so that the melody can spread through the house. In the kitchen he stacks away the saucepans and wipes the draining-boards and the stove. He hangs the cup up on the dresser and notices that there isn’t a chip on any of the three, and none that he can remember on the one that’s upstairs by the bedside. On all of them the green of the rim is worn away in places, as naturally it would be after time. In the recruiting shed the recruiting sergeant had run a finger over his thin moustache, hiding a smirk. He hadn’t attempted to disguise the fact that he considered it amusing that a would-be recruit should suggest a quartermaster’s duties when two small disabilities, to do with sight and feet, ruled out the career that all through childhood had been taken for granted. ‘You’ll never remember me,’ he might have said in the car park, catching up with the couple. Mr Hilditch pours milk for Ovaltine into a saucepan, enough for two cups, which they can drink together in the little bedroom now that she has calmed. He pads across the hall to change the record to ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’. ‘I’ll go in the morning.’ For the second time that day she causes him to jump. She is there at the bottom of the stairs when he emerges from the big front room, her red coat on top of her nightdress, her feet bare. She is carrying the tray, the sausages still untouched. ‘I’m heating milk for Ovaltine.’ He can think of nothing better to say, and she follows him into the kitchen, clearly more tranquil now. When he has made the drink he suggests they might like to have it in the big front room. ‘Make a change for you, eh?’ They sit on either side of the electric fire. When ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’ comes to an end he puts on ‘Charmaine’. ‘Forty-two pounds,’ she says. ‘If I could borrow that.’ ‘I doubt if that’s sufficient, dear. Any little mishap, it’s terrible to be short. Well, you’ve had experience yourself of course.’ ‘I’ll send every penny back. And every penny it cost today.’ ‘Today was my treat, dear, I’m happy about that. Ada would have wanted today.’ The music is soft enough to permit their conversation; they don’t have to raise their voices. She is in no fit state to travel anywhere: gently he says so. ‘You said you couldn’t face them, dear. You said it to me several times in the car. I’m nervous for you, dear.’ ‘I have to go.’ ‘You weren’t at all well in the car. All the way back. And in the hall. I thought I’d have to send for assistance the way you were in the hall. You can’t set out on a journey in that condition, dear.’ ‘I shouldn’t have done it.’ ‘What’s done’s done, dear. No one ever got rich on regrets. What about the bright side, eh? For as long as you want it, Felicia, there’s a welcome at Number Three. You have your own little room now. The sensible thing would be if we took it day by day.’ ‘I had dreams. All the time it was happening I had dreams. And then again afterwards, upstairs. That I was carrying the child in my arms, that we buried it under a potato stack.’ ‘Drink up your Ovaltine, dear.’ She repeats that she’ll pay back everything and he reminds her that this doesn’t matter. He paid debts for Jakki and for Beth, quite sizeable a few of them; he bought Elsie Covington a suite of furniture. All of it gave him pleasure, keeping them by him. He didn’t know at the time that the furniture was sold again immediately. ‘I have to go home now. No matter how I’m feeling I have to face them.’ Her coat has fallen back, revealing more of the blue and orange nightdress. She’s still wearing the cross around her neck. ‘I’d like you to stay on. Just for a day or two. You’re calmer, Felicia. It’s good to see that. You’ve come to terms with what was necessary.’ But she shakes her head so vehemently that he fears another outburst. She holds her tears back, twisting her fingers together, her knuckles turned white with the effort. Again she doesn’t trust herself to speak, which he’s grateful for. He lets the record come to an end before he speaks himself, quietly, not pressing the point. ‘It’s only that I’d rather see you with some nourishment in you before you set off anywhere.’ He crosses to where she’s sitting and removes the skin from the surface of her Ovaltine, returning the teaspoon to her saucer. He changes the record to ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. ‘I’m sorry to be fatherly, Felicia. I can’t help being fatherly because I’ve grown fond of you. The first day I saw you, you were there with your bags, woebegone and bedraggled. I’d like to be sure you were on the mend, that’s all I’m saying to you.’ ‘I’m all right.’ ‘I have to say far from it, Felicia. I’ll be honest with you: your Johnny wouldn’t know you, the way your eyes have sunk back into your head, and the big patches of black around them, and not an ounce of flesh to spare. I couldn’t let you go like that, I couldn’t let you walk out on to the streets. God knows what would happen, Felicia. D’you understand me, dear?’ She still hasn’t touched her Ovaltine. Her bare feet are petite on the patterned carpet – her best feature, now that he notices them. ‘I want to go,’ she says, and he explains that people often want to do something that isn’t in their best interests, that often it takes someone else to see what’s what. ‘That’s all I’m saying to you, dear. I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t say it.’ ‘Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer,’ the Chattanooga Choo Choo traveller promises, ‘than to have your ham ’n’ eggs in Carolina…’ He lets a silence grow. There’s a deadness about her eyes now, all the fervour that was present earlier totally gone. She’ll sink into a corner in that household where she came from, she’ll dry up into a woman who waits for ever for a useless man. The Black and Tans should have sorted that island out, his Uncle Wilf said, only unfortunately they held back for humane reasons. Choosing his words, he puts all that to her, though not mentioning the Black and Tans in case it upsets her. When he has finished, as though she hasn’t heard a word, she says again that she must go back now, that there is nothing else, that she has no choice. Then she stands up, and like a zombie makes her way out of the room. It wasn’t the recruiting sergeant with that woman. ‘Wishful thinking, dear,’ his mother used to say. Easy to get something wrong when you want to, she did it on occasion herself. ‘Well, you know that, dearie,’ she reminded him, in a twinkling mood, all dressed up, the fox’s head of her fur upside down, the fragrance of her lavender water. They were just some couple; a vague resemblance there had been and in an emotional state he had let his imagination run away with him. ‘Wishful Wally,’ she used to say, and laugh to show she was only being a tease. The whine of the needle on the no man’s land of the record has begun. Mr Hilditch listens to it, not moving from his chair, the ornate electric fire casting pink shadows on his trousers. Of all his rooms this is his favourite, the crimson wallpaper and set against it the soft green baize of the billiard table it took four men to carry in. The sofa and the well-stuffed armchairs, the cabinet of paperweights, the mantelpiece ornaments and the portraits of other people’s ancestors, the two grandfather clocks: all are at peace with one another and have a meaning for him. But for once the room’s tranquillity fails to influence the torrent Mr Hilditch’s emotions have become, and after some minutes he crosses to the gramophone and lifts the needle from the record. It is dangerous for the Irish girl to go. He said it and she didn’t listen; he said it clearly, he even repeated it. She’s going back to less than nothing. He doesn’t understand why she can’t see that. Beth couldn’t see it, either, when he put it to her that it was foolish to move south. Nor could Sharon when she said she had to go; nor Bobbi come to that, nor Gaye, nor Elsie Covington, nor Jakki. Mr Hilditch closes his eyes. A confusion oppresses him, blurring what he is trying to say to himself. This present one came up to him at his place of work, he didn’t make an approach. She let him drive her all over the place, mile after mile; she permitted him to wait on her hand and foot, no better than a servant. She made no payment for petrol or oil, nor for food consumed away from the house, nor in the house itself, nor for the cost of heating and light, soap and toilet paper. Why had she sat like that? Why had she leaned forward and then leaned back again? Why had she come down in the first place, indecent in that nightdress? He knows the answer. He doesn’t want to hear it, but it’s there anyway: she doesn’t care how she appears to him because she sees him in a certain light. She has guessed, as Beth guessed, the first of the others to do so. When Beth announced out of the blue that she was going south, everything she’d guessed was there in her eyes. It was there in all their eyes in the end. They were his friends and he was good to them. Then there was the other. Tears flow from Mr Hilditch, becoming rivulets in the flesh of his cheeks and his chin, dripping on to his neck, damping his shirt and his waistcoat. His sobbing becomes a moaning in the room, a sound as from an animal suffering beyond endurance, distraught and piteous.

‘No, write it out,’ Sister Francis Xavier insists. ‘Fifty times till you know it.’ The minute the bell goes all the voices begin at once, and there’s the noise of the chairs scraping, and footsteps running, and Sister Francis saying running’s not allowed. The voices dwindle, floating back up St Joseph’s Hill, until there is silence except for the ticking of the wall clock and a door closing. The maps are still hanging on the blackboard. They should have been put away, the physical and the political they’re called: mountains and rivers, the counties all different colours. Through the window, her father is in the garden, tying up Michaelmas daisies. He doesn’t see her looking at him; he doesn’t know she has been kept in. Is maith liom, she writes, and then the coffin is by the dug grave. Her mother is going into that hole, but Father Kilgallen says to heaven. Peace, Father Kilgallen says, and clay makes a clatter on the yellow wood. Father Kilgallen raises his hand for the blessing, and Carmel is the bridesmaid then. ‘Who’s that?’ Johnny asks, and someone says a nightclub singer. The singer has long black hair and bangles and earrings, high heels that shine, black like her hair. She smiles when she sings, a white flash in her face, the sunshine of Spain she calls it. ‘Where’s Johnny?’ Carmel asks, and Aidan says he came into McGrattan Street Cycles and Prams to buy a pram for the baby, but when she goes there she can’t find him. She looks for him by the old gasworks, but he isn’t there either. She calls out to him because it’s dark. He doesn’t come into the fish restaurant, he isn’t in Mr Caunce’s house. ‘Johnny!’ she calls out, going up in the hotel lift with the children, and the children make a singsong of his name. ‘You’re wanted, Johnny! You’re wanted!’ Connie Jo is laughing, drinking wine with Mr Logan. Rose says it’s a queer thing, Johnny going ahead on the honeymoon. ‘Take my hand,’ the Spanish woman sings. ‘Take my whole life too…’ He’s not in the Spud-U-Like when she climbs in through the window. He’s not in his mother’s kitchen. She opens all the doors in Mr Caunce’s house, where there are people lying down in the rooms, but he isn’t there either. The lavatory water drips down through the ceiling and the Spanish woman is crouched shivering on a bed, her scarlet dress thrown on to the floor. It’s what you’d expect, Miss Furey says, anyone called Johnny would cause you grief; terrible work, anyone called Johnny could get up to. ‘My God, that’s an awful sound to come out of any human being!’ Sister Benedict cries when she hears the Spanish woman’s weeping. He isn’t in Sheehy’s or in the Mandeville woods. He isn’t in the canning factory. She asks in Chawke’s and the Centra foodstore and Scaddan’s. She asks in the convent, but the weeping of the Spanish woman is so loud she can’t hear what anyone says to her. The crying of the Spanish woman is a weight that crushes her, pressing her down. ‘It’s there in your eyes,’ someone else says, sitting on her bed, a heaviness pulling back the bedclothes so that it’s cold. There is the sound of breathing, a catching sound, as though snagged with each emission. ‘What you’re thinking is there, Felicia.’ She tries to wake up, to wrench herself out of her dreaming. But she can’t wake up. ‘Don’t put the light on.’ The breathing becomes deeper, an urgent throatiness only inches from her face. The voice is a whisper. ‘It ruins everything, Felicia. Everything is destroyed.’ She opens her eyes. No light comes from the window, no hazy dawn filters through the curtains. His presence on her bed causes a depression that draws her own body towards him. He talks about other girls, naming each of them, describing them. No one ever knew except those girls, he says; they knew because of the closeness of the association. All he ever wanted to do was to sit with them; he spent a fortune on them, presents, meals, driving them wherever they wanted to go. Beth, and Elsie Covington. Sharon, Gaye, Bobbi and Jakki. It is a private thing that they have been his friends. ‘I’m telling you so’s you understand, Felicia. I never told another soul. We could have continued the association, you could have stayed in my house. No other girl ever came into my house. There was never that.’ It isn’t in any way like a dream now. She says she’s sorry if she did anything wrong. Because he mentions staying in his house, she says she didn’t mean to intrude. ‘You came downstairs in your nightdress.’ ‘I only came down to ask you to lend me the money. Nothing only that.’ ‘I took chances every hour you were here, dear. Every day I thought someone would find out. You occupied a bed. You used the lavatory and the bathroom. God knows what shadows on the glass.’ ‘No one saw me. I did everything you said.’ ‘It was enough what we had, Felicia. Just sitting and talking in the places we went to, you telling me all those things. But when I looked in the driving-mirror it was in your eyes too.’ ‘What was? Could I put the light on? I don’t follow what you mean.’ ‘When you know a thing like that it isn’t easy for any girl to pretend.’ The nervousness she felt at the bus station when he first offered to give her a lift is there again. She was nervous when she looked around the next morning and realized his wife was not in the back of the car. She hadn’t thought twice about it when he explained that unexpectedly his wife had had to go into hospital but now, suddenly, without having to think, she knows he never had a wife. ‘I pushed it away when I saw your eyes in the driving-mirror. I didn’t want to accept it. But then you came downstairs.’ ‘I’m sorry if I upset you. I didn’t mean to upset you. I don’t understand what you’re saying to me.’ ‘No one’s blaming you, dear. Things happen. Things take a turn.’ A hand is placed on one of hers. It’s only a pity, he says, that everything is ruined. No, don’t put on the light, he says; he doesn’t want the light. ‘Leave me alone, please.’ ‘They said they were going and I asked them why, but I didn’t have to, Felicia. You understand that, dear? You appreciate what I’m saying to you?’ ‘I’ll go away. I won’t bother you. It doesn’t matter about the money.’ ‘I was the world to them. In their time of need they counted on me.’ She knows the girls are dead. There is something that states it in the room, in the hoarse breathing, in the sweat that for a moment touches the side of her face, in the way he talks. The dark is oppressive with their deaths, cloying, threatening to turn odorous. ‘I’ll drive you away from my house.’ His whisper comes again, and she senses the blubbery mouth close to her. ‘Dress yourself and we’ll drive away. I have money to give you for the journey. Just walk out of the house and get into the car.’ She knows she must not do that. As surely as she knows about the girls, she is aware that she must not be drawn into the humpbacked car. He has waited for night to come and to settle: the dark is what he chooses, and the car. ‘Yes,’ she agrees. ‘Yes, I’ll dress myself.’ The floorboards creak as he lumbers his way to the door. She hears the rattle of the door handle, but no light shows when the door is opened, no silhouette appears. She hears him on the stairs, still in darkness, his footsteps heavily descending. Unable to move, petrified by fear of what may happen next, more frightened than she has been in his presence, she lies where he has left her, doubting that she will find the strength to leave the bed. But in time she does, and shakily feels her way across the room. Softly, she opens the door, to grope for a key on its other side. There is none. She feels a run of blood on her legs, then turns the light on and uses part of a sheet to wipe it away. Her hands and arms are trembling, which makes all movement difficult. She sits on the edge of the bed, looking round the room, her eye finally caught by a broken piece of fire-grate. Soot and specks of masonry have dropped on to the red crêpe paper that has been bundled into the grate; the broken bar has become dislodged and lies on the hearth. It blackens her hand and is too short to be effective in her protection, but at least it’s something. She dresses and drags her coat on. From far below, outside, she hears his footsteps on the gravel. She pulls back an edge of the curtain, but it’s still too dark to see him. The car door bangs softly, and she knows he’s waiting in it now. Cautiously she steps out on to the landing, still gripping the bar of the grate, her two carrier bags slung from the crook of her free arm, her handbag looped about her body. She descends the unlit stairway, pausing every two or three steps to listen in case he has returned to the house. The metal bar makes a clatter on the tiles of the hall when it slips from her fingers. In a panic because she can’t find the latch of the hall door, she feels for a light switch.

As he often does on a Sunday, Mr Hilditch visits a stately home. Arriving early, more than an hour before he will be able to gain admission, he parks his car in the empty car park, spreads his mackintosh coat on the grass beneath an oak tree and eats the sandwiches he has made: tuna and egg, with lettuce, tomato and spring onions. The car park is a level expanse that has been cut into a hillside; from his position under the tree, he can see most of the long, tarred drive that winds through parkland, and the house itself, a sprawl of red brick and stone, with turrets and chimneys, and walled gardens. Swards of crocuses bloom close to where he picnics. The bark of the tree is jagged on his back. He watches a blue bus turning in at the distant entrance gates, and coming closer on the drive. It disappears for a moment below the edge of the hill; the sound of its engine reaches him before it comes into sight again. Creeping into the car park, it reverses, moves forward, repeats these manoeuvres before finally positioning itself. A chatter of voices begins as its passengers step out; a girl in a blue uniform makes an announcement, saying that everyone should be outside the gift shop at half past four. The passengers disperse, descending by different paths to the house. Left alone, the driver lights a cigarette and spreads a newspaper out on a rustic table. Cars appear on the drive, and eventually turn into the car park also. A second bus – yellow and grey – arrives, disgorging further visitors to the house. Mr Hilditch watches them stretching themselves and setting off in pairs or groups. Then, having finished his sandwiches, he unwraps a KitKat before making his way in the same direction. He feels as he always does when a friendship has come to an end: empty, some part of him deflated. Already the Irish girl has joined the others in his Memory Lane: her round, wide-eyed face stares back at him when he thinks of her, the image as luminously alive as that of Beth or Elsie Covington. He always plans an outing as soon after a parting as is possible, in an effort to combat the lowness of his spirits. The day after Gaye went he came to this selfsame stately home. In the gardens that are spread out around the house Mr Hilditch lingers while shrubs and flowerbeds are examined by the other Sunday visitors, the winter buds identified. He keeps with the crowd; he is not in a hurry. ‘Nice, this time of year,’ he remarks to two women, sisters they seem like. ‘Nature lying low, eh?’ The women are amused by that, and smile. At a turnstile that leads into a cobbled stable-yard the charge for adults is a pound. Mr Hilditch pays, and passes with the others into the kitchen quarters of the house, where antique cooking utensils are laid out to offer a flavour of the past. Pantries and sculleries have been scrubbed clean and are empty except for vast copper jelly moulds and domes of fly-proof mesh. ‘Fascinating, eh?’ Mr Hilditch remarks to a couple who are admiring a device that turns butter back into cream. His enthusiasm is genuine, since professionally he finds much to interest him. Upstairs, in a high square hall with pillars, and in a dining-room and other reception rooms, life-size models of footmen stand in stately idleness. Petrified housemaids dust volumes in a library, or polish the surfaces of ornate tables. A family that occupied the house is recalled from another age also, in conversation or performing on musical instruments, or dancing; a girl brushing another girl’s hair; a solitary figure reading on a window-seat. Tasselled red ropes separate each display from the living observers who now file whispering by. In the scented bedrooms there are scenes of discreet undressing, hipbaths ready. As the hours pass, the tranquillity of the house and its landscape continues to please Mr Hilditch. In the cafe next to the gift shop he is served by girls wearing flowery dresses that reach down to their shoes, but it is too soon yet even to wonder if any one of them would appreciate the warmth of friendship: today there is no need for that. ‘Makes an outing,’ he remarks in an easy way to the people he shares a table with. ‘Fills a Sunday, eh?’ The people politely agree that it does, then continue with the conversation his comment has interrupted. When they rise to go, Mr Hilditch smiles and says goodbye. The last to leave the cafe, he purchases, as he pays, some of the cakes and scones that are left over. The two buses and most of the cars have driven off by the time he reaches the car park. As he eases himself behind the steering wheel, he sees again the girl he last befriended and with that image drives slowly through the dwindling twilight. When he arrives in Duke of Wellington Road, darkness has long ago preceded him and for a few moments he sits in his car after he has drawn it up on the gravel, not wishing to open the front door and step into the hall until he has gathered a little strength that may be of assistance in the silence of the house. In time he finds it, and mounts the four steps to his hall door.

For several days, whenever his thoughts are disturbed by the fact that his befriending of the Irish girl is known to a third party, Mr Hilditch continues to assure himself that this is of no possible significance. By now the West Indian woman has probably forgotten all about it, being more concerned with her paradise. A woman like that, with her brochures and her talk, has enough to fill her day without poking into a privacy. But, even so, as a little more time goes by, unease begins to agitate Mr Hilditch. He recalls how he sensed, when the Irish girl first accosted him, that the promise of an association was different from the others there had been. In the end it hadn’t been, because the Irish girl had parted from him also; but now it seems as if his intuition might have been right in some other, as yet unrevealed, way. During a wakeful night he hears the black woman’s voice, informing people that he didn’t pass by on the other side, that the girl sought assistance and he gave it. It’s not impossible that the woman would talk in that way, he reflects, his eyes unfocused in the dark; it’s even likely, since she brought the matter up with him. As that night advances, as the West Indian lilt and all it conveys become more insistent, Mr Hilditch makes an effort to distract his thoughts by directing them elsewhere: to the catering department, to his kitchens, to the bustle of the lunchtime canteen. He wrenches his concentration back to the days when he was still an invoice clerk, to the surprise of being summoned and told to sit down while it was confided that his name had been put forward for the position of catering manager. But although he pleasurably recalls the occasion – the details of training and remuneration pressed upon him before he had even properly said he was interested – he finds himself led by this same stream of thought into an earlier period of his life, when he still had hopes of a military career. ‘Oh, khaki’d suit you!’ His mother’s voice is joky at the Spa where she drank the water and bathed, while he sat waiting or strolled about the town. At the Spa there was a carved frieze: soldiers lying wounded with their shirts off, officers offering succour. The brotherhood that binds the Grave, were the words that formed the accompanying inscription, cut in the stone. At the baths his mother got talking to a woman who suffered from Garrad’s disease and his mother said what’s that? Related to Dupuytren’s Contracture, the woman maintained, though some denied it. The woman’s face was painted, magenta lips, smudges of mascara, powder on a pimpled skin. ‘Listen to this, dear,’ his mother urged. ‘Very interesting, this lady is!’ But he didn’t listen while the woman talked about her ailment, while his mother said fancy that and dearie me. ‘Wouldn’t khaki suit him?’ his mother said in the bar of the Clarence. ‘Going for a soldier, this little man is!’ On the train, returning from the Spa, a man with a beard gave him a threepenny piece. ‘Well, what a surprise!’ his mother said, her neck and face flushed crimson when they’d passed through the Longridge tunnel. ‘Well, I never!’ In spite of this evocation of his private past, when Mr Hilditch’s eyes droop he is again possessed by his speculations about the black woman’s doorstep talk. Then, when he tries to envisage the Irish girl among the pretty portraits that are his memory of the others, for the first time he fails to do so. The day he visited the stately home she was meekly there: now there is nothing, as if the black woman’s talk has robbed him of her. When the light of morning dawns Mr Hilditch rises, hours before he normally does. He makes tea in his kitchen, and walks slowly about his house, entering one room and then another. When the time comes to cook his breakfast, he finds he isn’t hungry. Later he drives away without food in his stomach.

He recognizes him at once: the tidy dark hair, the greenish eyes, the high cheekbones. Other features have not been included in the description Mr Hilditch has heard so often: a shiftiness in those eyes, a knowing smile that slants the mouth, a freshly grown moustache. Mr Hilditch waits until he is certain – until he hears the youth’s name used – before drawing back into the shadows of the corner he has chosen to occupy in the Goose and Gander. This is the first public house near the Old Hinley barracks he has tried, twenty minutes from Duke of Wellington Road. He was in his corner only long enough to sip half of the glass of mineral water he ordered before the five soldiers noisily arrived. Although they’re not in uniform, you can tell they’re soldiers from their haircuts and their gait. Fragments of their talk flutter across the bar to where he sits: it appears to be about motor-racing, a loose wheel spinning off into the crowd. ‘Bloody killed a bloke,’ one of the soldiers says. Mr Hilditch doesn’t know why he has come here. Some compulsion has drawn him to the place, and further presses him to eavesdrop on this conversation. As he listens to subsequent exchanges about car-racing tracks, he does not remember what his thoughts were before he left his house, and senses that there were no thoughts: he simply drove off, knowing where he was going. ‘Your bloody round, mate,’ one of the soldiers roughly reminds another, and there’s a general noise of agreement. Glasses are drained. As an encouragement to the soldier whose round it is, the surface of the table is repeatedly struck. Extraordinary to think of what she went through, deceived by this lout who cleared off without leaving her any means of contacting him, cunningly aware that he would be protected by an embittered mother. Mr Hilditch remembers the tears that so often flowed when they sat together watching the door of some café, the distress there was when another blank was drawn at a factory, the guilt induced by the aborting of the unborn child. A Wednesday it was when she appeared on the forecourt. Without making an effort, he has always been able to establish the day of the week on which events occur: a Friday when the recruiting sergeant said he’d better try something else; a Monday when he got the transfers and stencil set for his birthday – the smell of washing, the small red candles, Uncle Wilf there specially. It was a Saturday, always, when they went by train down to the Spa. ‘Bloody poofter,’ one of the soldiers says. ‘Corner of Brunswick Way every evening on the dot. Forty quid he’s offering.’ ‘Bloody never,’ is a disdainful comment, and: ‘Pull the one that chimes, boy.’ ‘Pull bloody nothing. Fancies a uniform, that poofter does.’ Mr Hilditch doesn’t know why he can’t see her as he still sees all the others, and can offer himself only the explanation that it is because she went from him in some different way, which is the feeling he has had since the black woman stirred everything up by mentioning her. His presence here has to do with how they parted: he recognizes that now, he knows it. He is here because there’s no place for her in his Memory Lane, because any moment she may walk in. He leans back in the shadows, the conversation of the soldiers lost to him. With his single glass of mineral water he remains in this corner until the landlord calls last orders and then inquires if his customers have a home to go to. The glasses are collected by a barmaid whom the five soldiers flatter with attentions before rowdily making off. Outside, Mr Hilditch watches them from his car and then drives about the streets, searching as desperately as his quarry once searched herself.

In time Mr Hilditch returns to work. It is the best chance he has, he considers, of feeling himself again. He is welcomed in the kitchens and in the canteen and conscientiously devotes himself to the backlog in his small office. But his appetite has not returned, which continues to be something of an embarrassment for a catering manager. He explains it away as best he can, and it is generally remarked that he has not yet fully recovered from the ailment that laid him low for so long. Then, one afternoon, without warning, an adjustment occurs in his memory. Between the Irish girl’s going upstairs in her nightdress and the blue bus appearing on the drive of the stately home there emerges something else: there is the sound of footsteps on the stairs, of a door closing at the top of the house. In his recall there is his awareness that she knows, that there have been moments, that day and in the evening, when he saw the knowledge in her eyes. It is on a Tuesday that the remembrance occurs. The last day of March, twenty-five to four. Interrupted in his perusal of last month’s overheads, Mr Hilditch gazes at a calendar that hangs on his office wall and fails to register its familiar details: two children in Victorian dress blowing bubbles, the compliments of Trafalgar Soup Powders plc. The fragment of recall he experiences is more vividly projected than the scene that has been chosen by Trafalgar Soup Powders. He wept when she went upstairs again in her nightdress, already on her way to the beck and call of a father and two brothers, to a stifled life, to guilt on her conscience for ever more. The gramophone needle rasped on the record. The glow of the electric fire was pink on his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers. ‘A tea, Mr Hilditch,’ the tea woman offers. ‘I’ve brought it to you first.’ It is what the tea woman always says. He always gets his tea first, suitable treatment for a catering manager. ‘Thanks very much.’ He tries to smile and wonders if he succeeds. ‘Nice again,’ the tea woman comments, but he does not hear and so does not reply, which causes the tea woman later to remark that the malady that laid Mr Hilditch low has left him on the deaf side. His eyes drop from their sightless survey of the bubble-blowers on the wall. Print-outs cover the surface of his desk, the cup of tea on its saucer among them. He reaches out and mechanically stirs two lumps of sugar into the warm, milky liquid. On her way back to nothing, he repeated to himself in his big front room, on her way to a bleakness that would wither her innocence: what good was that to anyone? He called to her but she didn’t hear, and then he went upstairs to put it to her that they should go for a drive. All that comes back now.

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.

‘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. ‘Hullo, Felicia.’ She is greeted herself, by an Indian who’s arranging fruit on the stalls outside his shop. He always speaks to her when she passes if he isn’t busy with a customer. He gave her some kiwi fruit when he was packing up his wares one evening, because it wouldn’t last the night, he said. She doesn’t know his name. Last night a woman she begged from in this street said no, then changed her mind and broke open a sliced loaf in her shopping-bag. Have that instead, she said, offering four slices, saying she knew for a fact that any money given would be spent on drink. Felicia didn’t contradict the assumption; you get used to what people say to you; it doesn’t matter. She knows she is not as she was; she is not the bridesmaid at the autumn wedding, not the girl who covered herself with a rug in the back of a car. The innocence that once was hers is now, with time, a foolishness, yet it is not disowned, and that same lost person is valued for leading her to where she is. Walking through another morning, fine after a wet night, she accepts without bewilderment the serenity that possesses her, and celebrates its fresh new presence. She dropped the bar of the fire-grate because her hands were nervous; she turned the light on because she was fumbling at the hall door, unable to find where the latch was. She didn’t think she’d get away; she prayed it would not be painful, that when it happened it would be swift. The novice at the convent said your mother’s waiting for you in heaven, Felicia; she thought of that as she turned the Yale latch. And then the light from the open hall door illuminated the fog, only just reaching the small green car on the gravel. He was bent over the steering wheel, crouching away from the light that had come on, covering his face. When she ran, the car didn’t follow her. But the strings of the carrier bags cut into her fingers because she was hurrying so, not holding them the way she’d taught herself to. The houses were shrouded, the street lights blurred; her feet made the only sound there was until she reached the wide main road where traffic thudded and headlights were dim before they burst out of the fog, white or yellow. ‘Hardly saw you,’ the driver of the lorry said, and later added that he had two daughters of his own, his crinkly hair grey in the light of the cab when he drew in to dissolve an Oxo cube in his flask. On the steps of some building in the town near where he dropped her she watched the sky lightening; the fog was gone then. A woman, raving, sat beside her for a while, and a street-cleansing vehicle crept by, hosing and brushing as it moved. When it was quiet again, sparrows sang. ‘We was married one time,’ the woman confided. ‘Benny Hill it was.’ Voices spoke to the woman, Benny Hill, Gary Glitter. ‘Lovely, them boys. Do anything for you, dear.’ Thrown into a bin attached to a lamppost, a coffee carton miraculously remains upright, the liquid it contains unspilt. Felicia drinks it, and finds most of a muffin still stuck to the paper it was baked in. ‘Young for a bag lady, ain’t you?’ someone going by said two days ago, and she said yes, liking to agree. ‘Cheers,’ an old man greeted her last night, tidy in an overcoat and hat, stepping out of the crowd to tell her she looked like Marilyn Monroe, swaying because he had a few drinks in. ‘Santa Ponsa,’ a girl says now. ‘Fantastic!’ And a man drops a section of a newspaper, the pages slipping from beneath his arm. Someone else calls out, shouting to the man that he has lost his paper, but the man says it’s only the Sport and Business. Felicia picks the pages up because they may be useful later on. ‘Can’t stand that Lovejoy,’ another girl says, and her companion argues, insisting that Lovejoy’s sexy. A shop window is full of wigs and beards and false moustaches. Theatrical Needs! a red sign flashes. The Big Emporium! In the field by the old gasworks a nettle stung her leg, and it didn’t matter, she hardly felt it. The only guilt is that she permitted her baby to be taken from her: she shouldn’t have done that, but there you are. She looks out now from where she is, and does not brood: what’s done is done. She does not brood on her one-time lover’s treachery. She walked away from a man who murdered girls. She was allowed to walk away: that is what she dwells upon. When she reaches the river she settles on a seat that is pleasant in the autumn warmth. By chance her eyes pass over her clothes and over her hands and feet, the shoes she found in a disposal bin, the skirt a woman gave her. Her appearance, or the tale it tells, doesn’t interest her. The Little Sisters of Africa come into her mind, their white habits damp in unhealthy jungle heat. Pray for our Little Sisters, Sister Francis Xavier enjoined. Kneel with us in the Gathering House, Miss Calligary begged, trudging from door to door. St Ursula stood steadfast by the helm, consoling her girl-companions when the vessel was tossed about on the waves. The Little Sisters nursed infants who were misshapen, famine infants whose bones came through their skin. See those brightly coloured birds! Miss Calligary urged. Smell the fragrance of those flowers! Do the girls who died and were never missed stroll now among the fragrant flowers, and listen to the birdsong? Do they keep company with St Ursula, who travelled to escape a marriage bed, and the Little Sisters who left their towns and townlands? Do those faceless girls occupy the heaven the novice spoke of, and touch the real fingers of the Holy Virgin? Elsie Covington and Beth. Sharon and Gaye. Jakki and Bobbi. Chosen for death because no one would know when they were there no longer. What trouble made victims of them? Did they guess their fate a moment before it came? Her mourning is to wonder. She roots in one of her bags and finds the newspaper pages she picked up. Tommy Griffiths up, Lone Ranger has won at five to four; an Olympian champion is in disgrace; a football manager has retired. She reads for a moment, then Tapper’s back again. Well, there’s a sight: the fountains and the four black lions, the first time she ever saw them. Frigging marvellous, Tapper said, the empire in its frigging day, Charles James Napier on a pedestal on account he had a way with soldiers. They didn’t put John Reginald Christie on no pedestal, a different bag of tricks on account he had a way with women. That’s where they run him in, Tapper said, pointing on the bridge. That’s where he ate his last in freedom, bacon and cabbage, the Lacy Dining Rooms. That’s where that woman ran a nightclub, the one that shot a racing driver. This city’s full of sights. All human life. Redland Sells Three Steetley Offshoots, the business pages say. U.S. Currency Holds Key. Fancy a blow by the briny? Tapper said and they went down by train, tickets he found in a handbag. Take a gander at that, he said, when two men in teddy-bear coats got out of a polished car and held the doors for two women. Excuse me, sir, Tapper said on the promenade, the sea dirty green beneath the foam, and the man said get off. No offence, another man said in a bar the time there were wrestlers on the television. No offence, but I think you picked up my fags. Tall as a telegraph pole, Tapper. Leaning down to tap the punters’ shoulders; part of the game. Alaska’s the place, he said, then again Johore Bahru. But more like Tapper’s gone inside. That’s Tapper all over: he said it himself, and maybe Lena said it too, you can almost hear her. You lose touch with a person who’s in and out; only a week it was she knew Tapper, longer than Lena and George that time, longer than Kev and the woman with one arm. The sun is warm now, the water of the river undisturbed. Seagulls teeter on the parapet in front of her, boats go by. The line of trees that breaks the monotony of the pavement is laden with leaves in shades of russet. Within her view, figures stride purposefully on a distant bridge, figures in miniature, creatures that could be unreal. One seagull eyes her, expecting crumbs, the others fly away. Somewhere a voice is loud on a megaphone. A klaxon sounds on the river. She isn’t hungry. It will be a few hours before she begins to feel hungry and then there’ll be the throwaway stuff in the bins. The sky is azure, evenly blue, hardly faded at the edges at all. She moves a hand back and forth on a slat of the seat she’s sitting on, her fingers caressing the smooth timber, the texture different where the paint has worn away, streaks of wood-grain raised. Died with others, 1938, was carved on another seat, and George said he’d sent a card to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and put in the rhyme he knew, greater are none beneath the sun than oak or ash or thorn. Carmel with a heart round it someone carved on a tree in the Square, Packy Egan or Lomasney, Rose thought it was. Rose might be Mrs Logan now, in a flashy house on the Mountrath road. Stranger things happen. The gap left where a tooth was drawn a fortnight ago has lost its soreness. She feels it with her tongue, pressing the tip of her tongue into the cavity, recalling the aching there has been. ‘There’s a woman dentist’ll fix you up.’ It was the Welshman, Davo, who said that, and they went along together because he knew the way. Not many would bother with your toothache, Davo said; not many would think toothache would occur in a derelict’s mouth. ‘Always come back,’ the woman dentist said. ‘Don’t be in pain.’ Felicia folds the Sport and Business section several times, and slides it back into one of her bags. ‘OK?’ the driver of a lorry carrying furnaces asked, and she said yes because it was only fair in return for a lift of two hundred miles, all the payment she could offer, and she had to go back. It took a night and part of a morning, three different lorries and a van, but she had to do it: she couldn’t not go back to Duke of Wellington Road. She had to know, and then she did: the estate agent’s board outside the house, and someone told her. Then a voice called out when later she was resting on a public seat. ‘Child,’ Miss Calligary cried, and there were tears of anguish on Miss Calligary’s cheeks while forgiveness was begged and the dead man vilified. Felicia takes off her headscarf and opens her coat to the sun. The seagull is motionless on the parapet, its beady observation of her continuing. A breeze rattles the pavement trees and the first tired leaves of another September loosen. One floats down softly, slowly descending until she reaches out and catches it on her palm. For minutes she gazes at it, not yet withered, taken before its time; and then her thoughts begin again. Wretched, awful man, poor mockery of a human creature, with his pebble spectacles and the tiny hands that didn’t match the rest of him, his executioner’s compulsion. Her living brought his death, but she didn’t say so, listening to him vilified that day; she didn’t say he was more terrible than a man who stole a distressed girl’s money; she didn’t mention murder, for what use would that be, now that he had murdered himself? ‘Please, child, come back to us!’ Miss Calligary cried, but she shook her head, even though she remembered the generosity and the friendliness of the Gathering House when first she arrived there. She shook her head at each repeated invitation, hearing between one plea and the next about the visits made to Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road, and how its occupant’s manner had seemed like madness to Miss Marcia Tibbitts, and how there’d been an occasion at a police station after the death occurred, a sergeant who’d been dismissive. In the end, reluctantly, Miss Calligary and Miss Marcia Tibbitts walked away, passing for ever out of her life. Again her thoughts shift: to a mother collapsed on the kitchen floor, and seaside shells brought back later in kindly compensation; to speckled green bird’s eggs, and John Count’s singing, no sign then of her father’s bitter eyes; to the inflicted wound that answered the ignominy of a husband gone away, and love for a son, as gentle as a cancer. Lost within a man who murdered, there was a soul like any other soul, purity itself it surely once had been. Such contemplations, alien to her once, fill Felicia’s day. She seeks no meaning in the thoughts that occur to her, any more than she searches for one in her purposeless journey, or finds a pattern in the muddle of time and people, but still the thoughts are there. Alone, no longer a child, no longer a girl, with the insistence of the grateful she goes from place to place, from street to street, binding her feet up, wet by rain that penetrates her clothes, frozen when there is ice on the gutter puddles. By day the clouds scutter or hardly move, or crowd away the sun in shades of grey, or blackly advance in bunched-up density, like ominous monsters of the sky. They’re there again in wind-blown tails of smoke, in big white bundles soft as down, in scarlet morning streaks. Sometimes all day there is an empty blue, hazy with mist or cleanly bright, backdrop for spindly winter trees, and backdrop again for summer greenery. At night, there is a city’s afterglow. There is a happiness in her solitude at dawn. The leaf blows from her palm in another soft breeze. The watchful seagull struts the parapet, still hungry for crumbs that are not there. Someone stopped who need not have, and called an ambulance for Dumb Hanna when she lay senseless on the street. The ladies come at night with soup, well-meaning, never forgetting, no matter what the weather. The woman dentist said don’t be in pain. The woman dentist has dedicated her existence to the rotten teeth of derelicts, to derelicts’ odour and filth. Her goodness is a greater mystery than the evil that distorted a man’s every spoken word, his every movement made. You would say it if you could, a new thought is, but sometimes saying isn’t easy. Idiot gawking, fool tramping nowhere: shreds of half-weary pity are thrown in the direction of a wayside figure, before the hasty glance darts on to something else. There will be other cities, and the streets of other cities, and other roads, Tappers and Georges and Lenas, Kevs and Davos and Dumb Hannas. There will be charity and shelter and mercy and disdain; and always, and everywhere, the chance that separates the living from the dead. Again the same people wander through her thoughts: the saint and the Little Sisters, Elsie Covington and Beth, Sharon and Gaye and Jakki and Bobbi, her mother not aged by a day. Are they really all together among the fragrant flowers, safe and blessed? She might be with them if it had happened; but she reflects, in modest doubt, that the certainty she knows is still what she would choose. She turns her hands so that the sun may catch them differently, and slightly lifts her head to warm the other side of her face.