Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer,’ the Chattanooga Choo Choo traveller promises, ‘than to have your ham ’n’ eggs in Carolina…’
He lets a silence grow. There’s a deadness about her eyes now, all the fervour that was present earlier totally gone. She’ll sink into a corner in that household where she came from, she’ll dry up into a woman who waits for ever for a useless man. The Black and Tans should have sorted that island out, his Uncle Wilf said, only unfortunately they held back for humane reasons. Choosing his words, he puts all that to her, though not mentioning the Black and Tans in case it upsets her. When he has finished, as though she hasn’t heard a word, she says again that she must go back now, that there is nothing else, that she has no choice. Then she stands up, and like a zombie makes her way out of the room.
It wasn’t the recruiting sergeant with that woman. ‘Wishful thinking, dear,’ his mother used to say. Easy to get something wrong when you want to, she did it on occasion herself. ‘Well, you know that, dearie,’ she reminded him, in a twinkling mood, all dressed up, the fox’s head of her fur upside down, the fragrance of her lavender water.
They were just some couple; a vague resemblance there had been and in an emotional state he had let his imagination run away with him. ‘Wishful Wally,’ she used to say, and laugh to show she was only being a tease.
The whine of the needle on the no man’s land of the record has begun. Mr Hilditch listens to it, not moving from his chair, the ornate electric fire casting pink shadows on his trousers. Of all his rooms this is his favourite, the crimson wallpaper and set against it the soft green baize of the billiard table it took four men to carry in. The sofa and the well-stuffed armchairs, the cabinet of paperweights, the mantelpiece ornaments and the portraits of other people’s ancestors, the two grandfather clocks: all are at peace with one another and have a meaning for him.
But for once the room’s tranquillity fails to influence the torrent Mr Hilditch’s emotions have become, and after some minutes he crosses to the gramophone and lifts the needle from the record. It is dangerous for the Irish girl to go. He said it and she didn’t listen; he said it clearly, he even repeated it. She’s going back to less than nothing. He doesn’t understand why she can’t see that.
Beth couldn’t see it, either, when he put it to her that it was foolish to move south. Nor could Sharon when she said she had to go; nor Bobbi come to that, nor Gaye, nor Elsie Covington, nor Jakki. Mr Hilditch closes his eyes. A confusion oppresses him, blurring what he is trying to say to himself. This present one came up to him at his place of work, he didn’t make an approach. She let him drive her all over the place, mile after mile; she permitted him to wait on her hand and foot, no better than a servant. She made no payment for petrol or oil, nor for food consumed away from the house, nor in the house itself, nor for the cost of heating and light, soap and toilet paper. Why had she sat like that? Why had she leaned forward and then leaned back again? Why had she come down in the first place, indecent in that nightdress? He knows the answer. He doesn’t want to hear it, but it’s there anyway: she doesn’t care how she appears to him because she sees him in a certain light. She has guessed, as Beth guessed, the first of the others to do so. When Beth announced out of the blue that she was going south, everything she’d guessed was there in her eyes. It was there in all their eyes in the end. They were his friends and he was good to them. Then there was the other.
Tears flow from Mr Hilditch, becoming rivulets in the flesh of his cheeks and his chin, dripping on to his neck, damping his shirt and his waistcoat. His sobbing becomes a moaning in the room, a sound as from an animal suffering beyond endurance, distraught and piteous.