17
She’s there in the waiting-room, standing in front of him, white as a sheet. The youth who saved up to go to Torremolinos doesn’t pay any attention. There’s no one else in the waiting-room now except the receptionist behind her glass window. ‘Sit down a minute, dear,’ he says, and as he approaches the receptionist’s window it is drawn back. He pays in cash. ‘Thank you,’ he says to the woman. ‘We’re greatly obliged.’ ‘See she keeps warm.’ ‘We have a little journey and then I’ll tuck her up.’ The woman nods, glancing at him once. He can feel her wanting to ask if he’s the father, even though she must have clearly heard it when he said girlfriend. He says the word again, mumbling through the rest of the sentence because in the time he can’t think of anything coherent to say. He smiles at the receptionist. It could happen to a bishop, he wants to say, that expression of his Uncle Wilf’s. But already the glass has slid back into place.
It’s sunny, crossing the street to the little green car. ‘You rest yourself now,’ he says, settling her in the back, and she closes her eyes, trying not to think about it. The most terrible sin of all, her mother would have said, God’s gift thrown back at Him. ‘OK?’ he asks and she says yes, but in all sorts of ways she doesn’t feel OK. She wants to ask him to lend her the money now. She wants to ask him to drop her off at a railway station, even though her belongings are still in his house. It doesn’t matter about her belongings; all that matters is going home. But when she tries to find the words to put to him she can’t.
Burger with egg, he orders, and a portion of chips. He feels tired: the experience has left him drained. ‘Thanks,’ he says when he receives his change at the pay-out, picking up his tray again and looking round for an unoccupied table. It is while doing so that he notices the man and woman sitting in the corner window. There’s something familiar about the man, something about the sharpness of his face and the grey frill of his moustache. That moustache used to be jet-black, Mr Hilditch comments to himself, still not recognizing the man. He is sitting like a ramrod and the woman is bent, suggesting arthritis. Again, there’s something familiar about the cocky way the man holds his head, and it dawns on Mr Hilditch then that this is almost certainly the recruiting sergeant who deprived him, thirty-six years ago, of his chosen way of life. The food in front of him cools, remaining untouched while he continues to observe the couple. When they rise he rises also, and follows them to the car park. But they walk in the opposite direction from where the Irish girl is waiting, and his hope of being able to get her out of the car – to let the couple see her hanging on to his arm – is dashed. He returns to the table he has been sitting at, but the contents of his tray have been cleared away, even though anyone could have guessed he was returning. He orders another burger and chips to take away.
There’s a picture of something, a kind of bird. Welcome Break is on the container from which steam rises, a smell of meat. ‘Fancy a Bakewell brought out?’ he says when he has finished. Her shoulders are too wide for the seat; her feet have to be on the floor because there isn’t room for them anywhere else. When she closes her eyes again Effie Holahan is swinging her legs on the play-yard wall. The wall is rounded at the top, newly cemented because the stones were always falling out, nice to sit on now, nice for Effie Holahan and Carmel and Rose and Connie Jo, and another girl. ‘We’re on the off,’ he says when he returns from depositing the empty carton in a bin. The engine starts up. There’s sun on the rug, a bright patch on the tartan. ‘You’re feeling good, eh?’ he says. ‘All the old troubles over.’ She dozes, and then her own voice rouses her, crying out that she shouldn’t have done it.
In the driving-mirror he catches a glimpse of her: peaky, hair requiring attention, her round white face. ‘God forgive me,’ she whispers, quieter now, after her noisy outburst caused him to jump. ‘Fancy a fruit jelly?’ he offers, passing the bag over his shoulder, wondering if that man had really been the recruiting sergeant or if he’d suffered a delusion, the way anyone might after an emotional experience. She doesn’t take a fruit jelly, but says again that she shouldn’t have done it. ‘I’ll make you a Bovril, dear, when we get home.’
She is warm beneath the bedclothes, safe in the bed with the wide mahogany bedstead and carved headboard that almost fills the room, one of its sides pressed against pink flowered wallpaper. A single window is a yard from its foot, and there’s a mat to step out on to, the only covering on the stained floorboards. There are plain blue curtains, which she has never drawn back, through which light filters in the daytime. Three heavily framed pictures are murky on the other walls, scenes of military action. The room contains neither a wardrobe nor a chest of drawers. She is aware of the pain that lingers, worse than it was, and the bleeding that lingers also, and of tiredness. Again her eyelids droop and she drifts away, her body seeming strangely elongated as she lies there, her feet so far away they might not be there at all, a numbness somewhere else. On the Creagh road a car going by sounds its horn; Johnny waves because it’s someone he knows, and then they turn off into the Mandeville woods. People are made for one another, he murmurs, his lips kissing her hair and her neck. His grey-green eyes are lit up because they’re together again, because all the looking for him is over. ‘Will I put the potato stack on the top of it?’ Miss Furey’s brother asks, and points at the hole he has dug in the corner of the field, beyond the yard. ‘Would we do it at night?’ he asks. ‘Only someone might come into the yard. If it was daytime we’d have to think of that.’ The corpse is under the hay in the barn. She carries it to the field, following him in the darkness and laying it down in the pit, the small amount of skin and blood that remains already disintegrating. ‘It’s the only way,’ someone says, and clay is shovelled in, the sods put back. She begs for forgiveness, clutching at the robes of the Virgin. But the eyes of the Virgin are blind, without whites or pupils, and then the statue falls down from the dresser and is gone for ever also. ‘Oh, aren’t you terrible, Felicia!’ The Reverend Mother is cross, sweeping the pieces into a dustpan. And her own mother is shelling peas in the doorway, the door open to the yard, and tears fall on to the peas in the colander. ‘Supposing I’d done that to you, Felicia,’ is what her mother tries to say, speaking made difficult because of her sobbing. But Felicia knows anyway. She knows what the words are even though they aren’t spoken.
18
No orders to attack the enemy were, however, given to the flotillas, and they therefore steamed passively along their course without instructions or information. Jellicoe’s signal to his flotillas was picked up by the German listening station at Neumünster, which reported to Scheer at 10.50 p.m. ‘Destroyers have taken up a position five sea miles astern of enemy’s main fleet