She starts on about the missing address, saying it’s all her fault. She says again she didn’t want to be pushy. ‘I know what you mean, dear. I know how you feel, I’ve had experience. Some of the young squaddies I had under me were in a shocking state due to emotional harassment. Terrible to see them – decent, innocent young fellows, bowels all to pieces.’ ‘I’d have stayed at home waiting for him if it wasn’t for the baby.’ Mr Hilditch nods sympathetically. He allows a silence to gather before he says: ‘Are you thinking of having the thing terminated, Felicia? Do they have that over there?’ ‘There’s difficulties.’ ‘You could have it done here, of course. Any day of the week you could have the matter attended to.’ He pauses. ‘Old friend, is he? Your sweetheart?’ Bit by bit, it all comes bucketing out, as he knew that sooner or later it would. In a misty, uninterested way Mr Hilditch envisages the wedding there has been, the youngest of his companion’s three brothers marrying above himself, a priest conducting the ceremony, the gathering in a hotel lounge. Then, when the bride and groom are driving off, the young thug happens to pass by on the street and the trouble begins. Smiles in a dancehall, walks in the countryside, autumn leaves in the woods, hands held under a cafe table. And in no time at all he’s off with a suitcase, leaving her to fend for herself. ‘He’d have come back at Christmastime only I’d say his mother said not to when she heard about us. God knows what she told Johnny.’ ‘God knows indeed, dear. I know the kind the mother is. I’ve had experience there too.’ ‘He was always protecting her because of what happened to her.’ Mr Hilditch listens while he is told about that, encouraging the flow of revelation, keen now to form a picture of the circumstances. ‘I take to the sound of your friend,’ he says when the picture is complete. ‘He didn’t have my address any more than I had his. We both forgot about that. I thought at one time he might have phoned up someone he knows – Cathal Kelly or Shay Mulroone, someone like that. I thought he might get them to pass a message on to me.’ ‘You can’t blame him for not thinking of it.’ ‘I’m not blaming him for anything.’ ‘What I mean is it’s surprising the things you don’t think of at the time.’ There is more about the mother, who by the sound of her knows the price of carrots. It’s not an unfamiliar story, Mr Hilditch reflects as he listens; give or take a few details, a similar tale buckets out of most of them. Twice, seemingly, Elsie Covington had a go at her wrists before their paths crossed. Teenage depression she called it, although she was more than halfway through her twenties. ‘You’ve had a time of it,’ he says, remembering saying the same thing to Jakki in the Dewdrop near Brinklow. Weals on her back, Jakki reported she had, after some fellow took a buckle to her. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you all that. At a time like this –’ ‘It does you good to get it out, Felicia.’ He adds that he’s glad she felt she could. They’re being eyed now by the old man, who has tired of his newspaper. Two people with a trouble, he says again: it’s strange the way things turn out. No one ever looked after another person as beautifully as Ada did, he says. ‘ “You get yourself ready for it, dear” she warned me – oh, must be six months ago.’ But the girl isn’t listening; her mind isn’t on it, which again is understandable in the circumstances. He knows what she is preoccupied with, and alludes to it. ‘There are inquiries I could make, Felicia. As to his whereabouts.’ She shakes her head: the usual thing, not wanting to be a nuisance. He says: ‘The girl I have in the office is very good. If we put our heads together we’d track him down, no problem at all.’ ‘How would you?’ ‘The girl would phone up every lawn-mower outfit in the Midlands. Coventry. Nuneaton. Derby. King’s Brompton. You name it. Added to which, there are citizens’ registers and rates registers and housing registers. Would it be an intrusion to inquire as to your friend’s name?’ ‘Johnny his name is. Lysaght.’ ‘And how are you spelling that, Felicia?’ She tells him; he writes it down. ‘But I couldn’t put you to the trouble. Not with your wife –’ ‘Ada’d want it, dear. A heart as big as a house. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ ‘Maybe it’ll be all right. Maybe when you go back to the hospital they’ll tell you –’ ‘I know what they’ll tell me, Felicia.’ He doesn’t mind crying in public. His sobs come softly, tears caught for a moment against the rims of his glasses. Ada has her ways, he whispers, but she’d never hurt a fly. A face blinks in his consciousness, its shape lost in excess flesh, stupid eyes. A woman who came to Number Three to make chair-covers, called Ada by his mother. ‘Don’t blame me for putting off going back to that ward, Felicia. Just for the minute I can’t face them there.’ He blows his nose. He slips his spectacles off and wipes them. It will take only a few minutes in the hospital, he suggests. When he has been there they can go back to that factory if it’s what she wants. He returns to the counter for another cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits. She protests again that she can’t go on being a nuisance to him, and again he contradicts her, saying she is a help. They leave Buddy’s Café soon after that and return to the hospital. He spends the time in the staff canteen, where the biscuits are of better quality than the biscuits in the cafe. ‘They still want to keep her undisturbed,’ he announces in the car, and when they’ve driven to the factory he waits while further fruitless inquiries are made. Later, on the journey back to his home ground, he pulls up suddenly in a lay-by. He can’t go on, he whispers. He can’t face the empty house alone. He wipes his spectacles clear and sits staring through the windscreen, willing the girl to speak, willing her to say that they’ll keep together for a while, that together they’ll look for her friend. He has words ready, to explain that in the neighbourhood where he’s known it wouldn’t do for him to be seen in the company of a young girl, that if she wouldn’t mind crouching down in the back of the car when they reach the outskirts of the town it would help a lot. Especially with Ada in a hospital it would help. But the girl still doesn’t respond to what he has said about not being able to face the empty house alone. The girl doesn’t say anything at all. ‘It’s hard for me,’ he whispers, and drives on, not asking her to crouch down in case it upsets matters further, telling himself it’s not unusual that she should be silent. But when he turns into the driveway of Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road – taking a chance he has never taken before by arriving in daylight at his house with a girl in his car – she reaches for the door handle as soon as the car is stationary. Two people in a trouble, he begins to say, but she shakes her head, again insisting that she can’t be a nuisance to him at a time like this. Then, like a rabbit scuttling off, she is gone.