Felicia's Journey Read online

  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.

  3

  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 f
latly 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.