At the very last moment, when she is suddenly there one afternoon, asking directions of a couple with a guide-dog, prudence restrains Mr Hilditch from the encounter he has been anticipating with some fervour. All he has to do is to cross the street and say hullo when the couple have moved on. If he’s noticed by a local person to whom he is known, by sight or otherwise, the chances are that not much significance will be read into it, the assumption made that further directions are being given. But the fact remains that this is still home ground and you never know. No way could they walk an inch together on the street. And what if she turned her taps on, or acted familiar? And how much of value could be exchanged in the minute or two it would be safe for him to stand there in the broad light of day, gesturing as he supplies the directions the guide-dog couple have been unable to assist her with? It is contact enough, Mr Hilditch decides during his hesitation, to know she has left the religious set-up, which he can tell she has from the fact that she’s on the streets with her carriers again. Patience will bring her back to him. Sooner or later she’ll turn to him for help, since he has offered it.
In a public lavatory, with the door locked, Felicia feels her way through the belongings in the heavier of her carrier bags, to the jersey in which she has secreted the greater part of her money. She has two pounds and seventy-three pence left in the purse in her handbag. But the sleeves of the jersey are empty and, thinking she has made a mistake, she searches the other bag. Since it yields nothing either, she returns to the first one. In a panic she takes everything out of both, littering the floor of the cubicle, unfolding the navy-blue jersey and shaking out all the other clothes. The money is not there. She tries to calm herself. Could the notes have somehow worked their way out of the woollen sleeves and become displaced when she took something from the bag in the room she first occupied overnight, or in the Gathering House, or in one of her other lodging places? ‘Nothing was found,’ the hatchet-faced landlady in Marshring Crescent states when she returns there. ‘What is it you’re missing?’ Felicia says it is money. She might have taken it out from where it was and put it down somewhere, although she doesn’t recall doing so. ‘No money was found.’ ‘Would it be possible to look, just to make sure?’ ‘The room was done out the day you left and every day since. I do the cleaning myself.’ Felicia explains that as a result of what has happened she has very little money left. All she wants to do is to make certain she didn’t leave anything behind. ‘You left nothing.’ The woman is emphatic. Felicia goes away. She makes the rounds of the other bed-and-breakfast houses, but without success. She is not surprised because by now it has become apparent to her that the money could not have made its way unaided out of her hiding place, and in none of these rooms did she leave her bags behind by day since in each she stayed no more than a single night. Only in the Gathering House did she do that, considering the bundle of banknotes safe among religious people. ‘So you return to us, child?’ Miss Calligary greets her a little stiffly when she rings the bell, not smiling in her usual manner. ‘So you are here again.’ ‘I had to go to look for my friend.’ ‘And now the friend has said to you, “I cannot assist”. Is it a friend who will say that to a girl heavy with child?’ ‘He doesn’t know.’ ‘Child, they always know.’ Not invited into the Gathering House, and sensing no sympathy whatsoever from Miss Calligary, Felicia suddenly feels tired. The loss of her money is a disaster almost as great as her failure to locate the right factory. The money isn’t even her own; if she wanted to turn round now and go home she wouldn’t be able to; she hasn’t enough left for a single night’s lodging. ‘I lost some money while I was here.’ ‘Money?’ ‘I had money in one of my bags.’ ‘What you saying to me, child?’ ‘I had money that was with my clothes. I had it hidden away and it’s been taken.’ ‘Not in this house. Never that, child.’ ‘It’s missing.’ ‘Stolen? You saying stolen?’ ‘Ah no, I’m not at all. Only I left it here during the daytime, I don’t know what I was thinking about. If we could just look –’ ‘You go away without a word, child. You come back here with this talk.’ ‘I have hardly any money now.’ ‘You are asking me for money, child?’ ‘Maybe I took it out here by mistake. Maybe it slipped out. If we could look in the room.’ Not deigning to reply, Miss Calligary opens the door a little wider and then leads the way to the empty Gathering Room. But there is nowhere there where the money could be, no drawers to pull out, no carpet on the parquet floor, and only the radiators behind which Felicia hopelessly looks. ‘You leave us, child. You turn your back on our people and our true belief and now there is accusations.’ Tears run over Felicia’s cheeks as she shakes her head, denying that she has turned her back. Everyone was kind to her, she says; everyone was sympathetic; she was ashamed that she moved on so hurriedly. It was all her fault; she should have looked every day to see that the money was still there. She should have divided it more evenly, half in the jersey, half in her handbag. In an effort to control her sobs, she clenches her fingers into her palms until it hurts. ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Miss Calligary waits for Felicia’s distress to subside, then reminds her that soon the inmates of the house will arrive with news of the day’s gathering. When the folk are fully congregated she will inform them of what has occurred, and make inquiries about the possibility of the money having been found lying around and put away for safety. There is a wait, and there is silence between them. Then, when everyone has returned, when Felicia has been greeted – though without the warmth she previously experienced – Miss Calligary puts it to the assembled Gatherers. Their response is to stare at Felicia with disappointment that is not disguised. All trace of friendliness has drained from the bloodshot eyes of the old Ethiopian and from Mr Hikuku’s, peering out of their narrowness. The hurt in the other faces distorts them; loathing sours Agnes’s prettiness. No one speaks. Miss Calligary has become so still her features might be cut in ebony. With nothing left to say, Felicia goes away.
12
Mr Hilditch draws up the figures for the January expenditure and canteen takings, spreading the monthly subsidy lightly in the hope of holding on to a bit extra for February. At four o’clock a vending-machine representative begins his sales pitch: install a bank of food machines in the canteen and you dispense with all canteen staff. The machines would back directly on to the kitchens, the prepared portions loaded straight into them: at the drop of a coin the dishes would emerge when and how they’re required, piping hot or chilled. Drinks likewise: load the machines with the necessary ingredients – tea, coffee, chocolate, softs, no more than ten minutes’ labour a day. ‘You can’t lose, Mr Hilditch,’ the vending man assures him, but Mr Hilditch has no intention of making a change. He likes the old ways. He likes to see his canteen staff, the women’s hair tied up under their caps, the chatter and bustle of the queues, steam rising from the pans, mashed potato scooped up, an extra spoonful of sprouts jollied out of the server. Yet in spite of this preference he is always prepared to see a catering representative in the lull of the afternoon. He enjoys the interruption, a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits shared. He feels it gives a shape to the day. Tomorrow the Colman’s mustard man is due. These passing days are shaped in another way also: with speculation, with reassurance following doubt, with the steadying of his thoughts. The unknown factor is how much money she retained in her handbag, how long she can manage to keep going. The nag is that while she’s hanging about on the streets there’s the danger of her running into the boyfriend. Added to which it could dawn on her at any moment that there might be something, after all, in her father’s astute suspicions: anyone she cares to ask would direct her to the barracks. Driving home on the evening of the vending salesman’s visit, Mr Hilditch shakes his head with renewed finality: all that is a chance that has to be taken. What matters more is that she’s still around, and is likely to be. But that night, having deadlocked his front door and shot the bolts at the back, Mr Hilditch mounts his stairs feeling nervous in case he has let everything slip away from him. In the days that have passed since his sighting of the girl she could have stumbled on her quarry. At this very moment he could be making a clean breast of his deception, buttering her up with devious excuses. At this very moment she could be getting herself up the pole all over again. Savagely Mr Hilditch brushes his teeth, painfully attacking his lower gum as he reflects on the way the world is these days: crazy God-botherers enticing young girls, lying thugs taking advantage, you name it and it’s there. GP Ruined my Sex Life! says Boob-Op Fourteen-Year-Old Mum. Dog-Collar Dougie Had Sofa Sex with my Pal for Revenge! Kids in Black Mass Sacrifices! The headlines race through Mr Hilditch’s memory, culled from the newspapers he sometimes carries away from the canteen because he likes to see it tidy. Every day of the week, seemingly, cigarettes are stubbed out on the flesh of infants. Every day of the week women in their nineties suffer rape and violence. Flaming petrol is poured through letter-boxes for the fun of it. Cars are stolen, televisions are stolen. Company directors spend their employees’ pensions on motor yachts. Drug addicts get their fixes over the counter in Boot’s. Teenage girls are set alight on city wastelands. Mr Hilditch cools his face with water. Calm again, in bed, he recalls an evening with Bobbi in the Welcome Spoon at Legge’s Corner near Junction 18. They sat for hours, maybe even three, while she poured out her troubles, in much the same way as the Irish one has. ‘You wouldn’t credit half of it,’ Bobbi said: the abuse she received at the hands of the man her mother took in after her father went off; the home she spent six months at, where men in belted overcoats arrived at weekends intent on the same. With Bobbi’s almost pretty face for company, Mr Hilditch drops off. The following evening, distancing himself equally from his place of work and Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road, Mr Hilditch drives to a supermarket where he is not known. He purchases hairnets and tights and women’s underclothes, talcum powder and skin cream. Already, at a Saturday jumble sale, he has selected outer garments and two hats. After he has eaten, he arranges these articles about the house, filling a wardrobe with coats and skirts and dresses, and drawers with underclothes which he takes the trouble to crumple up, even to tear a little. He half empties bottles of lotions and squeezes cream from tubes. He packs the talcum powder, with lipstick and eye make-up, into the bathroom cabinet. He drapes the tights over the rails of the ceiling-drier in the kitchen. He locks away his spike of receipts, and any envelopes and papers that bear his name, old cheque-books and bank statements. When Mr Hilditch’s mother died he sold her belongings to a clothes dealer who sent in a card, but he later discovered that the cardboard box he’d filled with her shoes had been overlooked. Planning to dispose of these on some future occasion, he stored them in an outside shed. On the kitchen table he wipes off the mildew and later arranges them in a row by the side of the wardrobe.