Felicia's Journey (6 page)

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.

5

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.

There are no hills. Against a grey sky, tall bleak chimneys belch out their own hot clouds. Factories seem like fortresses, their towers protecting an ancient realm of iron and wealth. Terracotta everywhere has blackened to the insistent local sheen. The lie of the land is lost beneath a weight of purpose, its natural idiosyncrasy stifled, contours pressed away.

The bus that carries Felicia through all this is almost empty. Women with shopping-bags occupy seats on their own, staring ahead at the driver’s back. A child perpetually cries, ineffectively hushed by its mother. A man mutters as he turns the pages of a newspaper.

As the bus approaches the periphery of the town where Thompson Castings is, the flat roadside fields dwindle, and the factories intensify in number, one rubbing against another. In one of them, Felicia imagines Johnny Lysaght, with spare parts arranged behind him floor to ceiling, in wooden drawers and on shelves. She imagines him in his work clothes, a brown overall, the same brown as the assistants in Multilly’s hardware. He looks for something he has been asked for, and whistles the way he sometimes does. When she visualizes it, Thompson Castings is a place
like Queally’s the agricultural-machinery depot on the Roscrea road.

‘Happen it’s out a bit.’ A man in a uniform hazards an opinion at the bus station, lips pursed in irritation because he doesn’t know. ‘Never heard of it, to tell the truth.’

She walks into the town, which has an older look than the town she has travelled from but with the same insignia on banks and stores. Streets amble and twist and turn, petering away to become lanes and alleys, the picturesque preserved as if in protest at the towers and chimneys that mar the town’s approaches. ‘Excuse me,’ Felicia interrupts a man in a wheelchair outside a teashop with small-paned windows that bulge out in a bow. ‘Push me in, dear,’ the man directs. ‘We’ll inquire inside.’

The cashier by the till asks a passing waitress if she knows where Thompson Castings is. The waitress shakes her head, but repeats the query to the people she’s serving. ‘Thompson’s,’ an elderly woman recalls. ‘Used to be in Half Street.’ But someone else says that was Thompson’s the leather people.

In a shop that sells electrical goods a briskly mannered man, grey-suited, knows at once: Thompson Castings was taken over by some larger concern two years ago. Another victim of the recession, this man asserts, no doubt about it. You can’t walk a yard without the recession impinging, tales of it everywhere. But when Felicia asks him if he knows what Thompson Castings is called now he says he’s stumped. On the streets again no one knows either.

So Felicia returns to the teashop with the bulging windows and sits over a cup of tea because they were helpful to her there. The tables all around her are full, with housewives and office employees who’ve slipped out for a moment; the waitresses hurry, chivvied by the cashier, who leaves her till from time to time in order to find people seats. The two women at Felicia’s table are talking about a third woman’s unsatisfactory marriage. They are smartly dressed and made up, seeming younger than perhaps they are, fortyish.

‘No one could put up with Garth,’ one of them declares, eyeing the fingers of shortbread that have been placed on the table. ‘Dire, that man is.’

‘You have knowledge of Garth, of course.’

‘You could say.’

She’s becoming used to the accent, Felicia realizes, listening to further exchanges about this husband. Her carrier bags are close to her chair, where she can see them when she glances down. She has removed from her handbag the banknotes the security man who interrogated her didn’t comment on, keeping only a few back: the bulk of them are stuffed into the arms of a jumper at the bottom of one of the carrier bags, safer there than in a handbag that might attract a thief. Connie Jo put her handbag down in a café in Dublin and when she turned to pick it up there wasn’t a sign of it.

‘You couldn’t live with stuff like that,’ the first woman maintains. ‘I always said it.’

‘Into swapping, the company Garth keeps. They offered her Bob Mather one time.’

‘They never did!’

‘Garth fancies Beryl Mather was at the root of that.’

‘Excuse me,’ Felicia asks the women. ‘Would you know what Thompson Castings is called now?’

They look at her, surprised.

‘What?’ one says.

Felicia repeats the question, and the other woman says there’s Thompson’s in Half Street.

‘The Thompson’s I’m after was taken over two years ago,’ Felicia explains. ‘They make lawn-mowers. The place in Half Street is different.’

The women shake their heads. One of them says she has a Flymo herself.

‘Only a friend of mine works there,’ Felicia explains. ‘I’m trying to find him.’

‘Could be anywhere,’ the woman who has a Flymo points out, reaching for a finger of shortbread.

‘I know.’

When the two women rise to go Felicia asks the waitress who scribbles out their bill, a different waitress from the one who was helpful before. ‘Half Street,’ this waitress says, abrupt and in a hurry, and doesn’t notice when Felicia shakes her head. She asks
the couple who occupy the table next to hers, but neither has heard of Thompson Castings, not even in the days before the takeover. She waits for the bustle of the tearoom to calm in the hope that the cashier will be less busy. She’s certain now that Thompson Castings, under its new name, is the place she’s looking for. She has a feeling about it: he lives in one town and works in the other, no reason why he shouldn’t. She even wonders if he didn’t say something like that, but then they talked about so much. ‘Eleven days left,’ he said and on every one of them they met. They walked out to Creagh crossroads in the October sunshine, and held hands in the little crossroads bar attached to Byrne’s grocery. They hurried back through the Mandeville woods because it was a short cut, because he didn’t like to leave his mother for too long since she saw so little of him.

‘Thompson Castings got taken over,’ Felicia tells the cashier when she pays for her tea. ‘Apparently it’s called something else now.’

But this time the cashier looks blankly at her, as if not recalling their previous conversation. ‘Yes,’ she says, and Felicia leaves the chatter of the tearoom and walks about the streets, asking other people.

She sits for a while on a seat, each hand gripping the string of a carrier bag, the strap of her handbag tight on her chest. They had always had to be careful not to cause difficulties with his mother. When they went to the Diamond Coffee Dock he chose a table at the back in case she passed by on the street outside and saw them. That would upset her, he explained: years ago she had been betrayed in love and had been distrustful of love since. Felicia didn’t know his mother to speak to but she sometimes came across her in the shops: a small, tired-looking woman, a widow, Felicia had assumed until he told her that she’d been deserted. A fine white line – a bleached-out scar – ran from beneath her left eye to her jawbone, and this was what you noticed about her most. ‘I understand,’ Felicia said when he explained that there was nothing he’d have enjoyed more than strolling for longer through the Mandeville woods now that the leaves were on the turn, or idling for hour after hour in the little bar at Byrne’s. But of necessity their
meetings were often snatched, their coffee hastily drunk. There were glances at his watch even when they were in one another’s arms down at the old gasworks. ‘Will you be back soon again?’ she asked him in the Diamond Coffee Dock on the day of his departure and he said maybe for Christmas. ‘Could I write to you?’ she asked, and he said he’d give her the address, not that he was much of a one for letters himself. He put his hand over hers on the diamond-patterned surface of the table. ‘Every minute I’ll think of you,’ he said, his fingers still pressing hers. ‘Every minute I’ll have you by me.’ He kissed her on the lips, not minding that the woman serving could see, and she asked him what the address was. He began to tell her, but unfortunately Shay Mulroone came in just then. ‘How’re you doing?’ Shay Mulroone said, leaning against the wall in his working clothes. She prayed he would go away, that it would dawn on him they wanted to be alone, but he just went on telling jokes and laughing. ‘Give me a Coke,’ he ordered eventually, and plonked the money down on the counter. ‘No, by the neck,’ he said when the woman began to pour the drink out, and then he took the bottle and moved towards the door, drinking as he went. ‘Cheers,’ he said, and related a tale about a woodpecker that had got into a honeymoon couple’s luggage. ‘God, I creased myself laughing the first time I heard that one!’

A flow of bitterness returns when Felicia remembers Shay Mulroone that day, with his broken nose and funny eye, his voice going on and on, his noisy sniggers. If Shay Mulroone hadn’t entered the Coffee Dock when he did none of this would be occurring now. They would have kept in touch; letters or postcards – anything at all – would have been exchanged; there might even have been a telephone number. ‘Will you write down the address for me?’ she said as soon as they were alone again, but everything was a muddle then because the bus was going in less than twenty minutes. ‘Oh God, look at the time!’ He was on his feet as he spoke and she thought he would write it out there and then, that he’d root in his pockets for a piece of paper and maybe borrow a ballpoint from the woman behind the counter, but instead he became agitated about catching the bus. He’d send her the address, he said, the first thing he did when he arrived. A moment later he
was gone and she was left with nothing of him except an empty, sick feeling, as if part of her stomach had been scooped out. She carried her glass coffee mug to a table in the window, thinking that any minute she would disgrace herself by giving way to tears. The address she didn’t have – which she had so tentatively asked for in the first place, not wanting to be pushy – had been snatched from her as a lifeline might be. She hadn’t realized that even his handwriting on some scrap of paper would have been something to treasure, apart from anything else. From the window she could see Doheny’s grocery, where the buses drew in on the other side of the Square. Ten minutes passed and then he was there, with a suitcase, his mother at his side, her arm in his. They passed beneath the statue of the gaitered soldier that stood on the Main Street side of the Square, pausing then for a moment to allow a car to go by before they completed their journey. On the pavement outside Doheny’s they were the only two waiting, and within a minute the bus arrived, slowing to a halt while a fresh nagging began: how could he send her his address since he didn’t know her own? She had never told him, not even the name of the street: on his journey he would realize that but then it would be too late. ‘Bye,’ the woman called from behind the counter when she hurried from the Coffee Dock but she was unable to answer, not even to respond by gesturing. Across the Square the bus began to move and then an elongated red setter – the ensign on its side – passed close to where she stood. For a single instant his face was there also, the dark hair, a hand raised in a farewell salute to the small, greyly dressed woman on the pavement. The back of the bus was so dusty that its red-and-white paintwork was obscured, misted into shades of brown.