11
Mr Hilditch has seen them about: nutters, is his view. He has noticed them on the streets, imposing their literature on people, bothering people with religious talk. Somehow or other the girl has become entangled with them; certainly she’s lodging in their house because he has seen her entering it. An innocent girl from the bogs of Ireland, susceptible to any suggestion they’d make: what chance would she have under pressure like that? The only consolation is that the house she’s in is well away from the Old Hinley Road barracks, two miles at least, maybe two and a half. The lads from the barracks use the Goose and Gander, and Hinley Fish ‘n’ Chips at the Stoat roundabout, or else the Queen’s Head down Budder way. Mr Hilditch remembers that from the Elsie Covington days, when a young thug from the barracks had her out a couple of times. The area isn’t part of the town, never was. Apart from the barracks, there’s nothing much doing there: weekends or a heavy night out, the squaddies are on the motorway down to Brum. Mr Hilditch plays ‘Falling in Love Again’ on his gramophone, then ‘Stella by Starlight’ and ‘Makin’ Whoopee’. The records are old seventy-eights: being an antique, the gramophone doesn’t play anything else. Mr Hilditch relaxes in an armchair, the Daily Telegraph – all of it read – on the carpet beside him, the melodies a solace in his worry about the well-being of the girl he has befriended. ‘Ev’ry rolling stone gets to feel alone,’ sings Doris Day, ‘When home sweet home is far away.’ Mr Hilditch calls this room his big front room, the expression used privately to himself because there never has been a call to use it to anyone else. The oil paintings of other people’s ancestors gaze benignly down at him. His billiard table, rarely used, is in a corner; a cabinet contains someone else’s collection of paperweights. Two grandfather clocks, wound every Thursday evening and adjusted daily, tick agreeably, one between the heavily curtained windows, the other by the door. On the black marble mantelpiece, above a mammoth electric fire with glowing coals, there are china mugs, and ornaments: a seal balancing a ball, ballet dancers, a comic orchestra of Dalmatians, highland cattle. The room’s wallpaper is mainly crimson, roses on a trellis. Books of military history, back numbers of the National Geographic magazine, bound volumes of Punch and the Railway and Travel Monthly fill a bookcase. ‘Never thought my heart could be so yearny,’ sings Doris Day. ‘Why did I decide to roam?’ The song concludes and the needle whines softly as the record continues to revolve. It’s a pleasant sound, Mr Hilditch considers and listens to it lazily, much calmer now than when he entered the room an hour ago. Tomorrow he’ll try again for an encounter.
For several days Felicia lodges in the Gathering House, leaving it every morning to make inquiries, to scan the faces on the streets and to travel to factories she has heard about, in other towns. Often she is sent in error to a factory that has changed its function, and in this way she becomes familiar with plant-hire yards, and sheds where diggers and tracked excavators are repaired, and engineering works where compressors and rammers are manufactured. In her continuing search for anywhere that has to do with lawn-mowers she passes by scrapyards in which old motorcars are disembowelled before being heaped on top of one another, and timber yards and builders’ yards and brewers’ yards. When she asks, she is sometimes told – if she happens to ask an elderly person – about the great mowers of the past: the days of the Dennis, and the Ransome and the Atco in their prime. Nothing is as it was then, such informants agree, shaking their heads over her hopeless task as if it, too, is an aspect of nothing being as it was. Every evening in the Gathering Room the other inmates ask her if she has found her friend yet and she says no. No one comments and still no one condemns. She eats with Miss Calligary, as she did the first evening, and every morning Miss Calligary makes tea for both of them, and offers cornflakes and toast. Felicia guesses that Miss Calligary has been in touch with the Father Lord on her behalf, that Mr Hikuku has, and the woman with sweet breath, and the Priscatts, and Agnes and Bob and Ruthie, and the old Ethiopian whose face resembles a walnut. Joyful expectation greets her every evening when the people congregate, their concern for her apparent all over again, their forgiveness offered afresh: hers is the soul that has been saved on the premises; she is the sinner whose redemption is present for each and every one to witness. In the shining brightness of the Gatherers’ love an infant will be made aware of the Message and the Way, its infant’s inheritance the future of the one who dies, a girl child who shall be called Joanna. The heady, unreal atmosphere becomes cloying in the end. Aware that her mute presence has misled the people of the Gathering House, Felicia does her best to dispel the illusion her arrival has engendered, but no one listens. And the more they do not do so the more it is borne in upon her that she is accepting their hospitality under false pretences. She is a pregnant girl who is desperately hunting for the father of her child: there’s no more to it than that. So early one morning she goes, leaving a note on her bed-roll, thanking everyone. As she did before she was taken in at the Gathering House, she moves about then from one bed-and-breakfast place to another, changing districts in the hope of finding herself by chance in the neighbourhood of the missing address, still travelling by day to factories she has been advised about. You have all been good to me, the note she left behind in the Gathering House says, but when she catches a glimpse of Mr Hikuku on the street she feels guilty about leaving in the way she did. Once she catches a glimpse of the little green humpbacked car, and she feels guilty then too.