Felicia's Journey (5 page)

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books that Multilly of the hardware had let him have when their contents went out of date.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.