Felicia's Journey Read online

  ‘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.

  That night, at five minutes to twelve, Mr Hilditch slowly mounts the stairs to his bedroom.

  His Uncle Wilf went to Ireland after the First World War. He went to settle the unrest, and came back with a story or two, nothing spectacular, just army tales. He died a dozen or so years ago at eighty-eight, still telling his army tales about skirmishes in France and Belgium, and reading the riot act in Ireland.

  It was listening to his Uncle Wilf as a child that made Mr Hilditch want to join a regiment himself, an urge that increased as he grew older. But they wouldn’t take him when the moment came because of his eyesight and his feet. He pressed his application, having been eager for so long, thinking that maybe the quartermaster’s department or the cookhouse wouldn’t be particular, not knowing how these things were regulated. ‘Not a chance, old son,’ a recruiting sergeant said, a cold-faced little upstart with a black blade of a moustache. Ever since, the disappointment has remained, stuck there beyond its time.

  Funny the way your thoughts go round, Mr Hilditch reflects. Funny the way they begin with a girl’s face lingering and then get back to Uncle Wilf and that recruiting sergeant. Number 19 she went into.

  4

  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.