‘Right as rain that man was at first,’ Miss Calligary remarks as she and her companion make their way along Duke of Wellington Road. ‘Right as rain and then he goes peculiar.’ It worries Miss Calligary that this has happened. This big, stout man was there for the gathering; she would have sworn it. A solitary man, a lonely man: anyone could tell. He could have got the wrong end of the stick, thinking that the Irish girl was a Gatherer herself and backing off now for that very reason – once bitten, twice shy. Miss Calligary ear-marks a day for their return, requesting Marcia Tibbitts to note the number of the house.
21
For several days, whenever his thoughts are disturbed by the fact that his befriending of the Irish girl is known to a third party, Mr Hilditch continues to assure himself that this is of no possible significance. By now the West Indian woman has probably forgotten all about it, being more concerned with her paradise. A woman like that, with her brochures and her talk, has enough to fill her day without poking into a privacy. But, even so, as a little more time goes by, unease begins to agitate Mr Hilditch. He recalls how he sensed, when the Irish girl first accosted him, that the promise of an association was different from the others there had been. In the end it hadn’t been, because the Irish girl had parted from him also; but now it seems as if his intuition might have been right in some other, as yet unrevealed, way. During a wakeful night he hears the black woman’s voice, informing people that he didn’t pass by on the other side, that the girl sought assistance and he gave it. It’s not impossible that the woman would talk in that way, he reflects, his eyes unfocused in the dark; it’s even likely, since she brought the matter up with him. As that night advances, as the West Indian lilt and all it conveys become more insistent, Mr Hilditch makes an effort to distract his thoughts by directing them elsewhere: to the catering department, to his kitchens, to the bustle of the lunchtime canteen. He wrenches his concentration back to the days when he was still an invoice clerk, to the surprise of being summoned and told to sit down while it was confided that his name had been put forward for the position of catering manager. But although he pleasurably recalls the occasion – the details of training and remuneration pressed upon him before he had even properly said he was interested – he finds himself led by this same stream of thought into an earlier period of his life, when he still had hopes of a military career. ‘Oh, khaki’d suit you!’ His mother’s voice is joky at the Spa where she drank the water and bathed, while he sat waiting or strolled about the town. At the Spa there was a carved frieze: soldiers lying wounded with their shirts off, officers offering succour. The brotherhood that binds the Grave, were the words that formed the accompanying inscription, cut in the stone. At the baths his mother got talking to a woman who suffered from Garrad’s disease and his mother said what’s that? Related to Dupuytren’s Contracture, the woman maintained, though some denied it. The woman’s face was painted, magenta lips, smudges of mascara, powder on a pimpled skin. ‘Listen to this, dear,’ his mother urged. ‘Very interesting, this lady is!’ But he didn’t listen while the woman talked about her ailment, while his mother said fancy that and dearie me. ‘Wouldn’t khaki suit him?’ his mother said in the bar of the Clarence. ‘Going for a soldier, this little man is!’ On the train, returning from the Spa, a man with a beard gave him a threepenny piece. ‘Well, what a surprise!’ his mother said, her neck and face flushed crimson when they’d passed through the Longridge tunnel. ‘Well, I never!’ In spite of this evocation of his private past, when Mr Hilditch’s eyes droop he is again possessed by his speculations about the black woman’s doorstep talk. Then, when he tries to envisage the Irish girl among the pretty portraits that are his memory of the others, for the first time he fails to do so. The day he visited the stately home she was meekly there: now there is nothing, as if the black woman’s talk has robbed him of her. When the light of morning dawns Mr Hilditch rises, hours before he normally does. He makes tea in his kitchen, and walks slowly about his house, entering one room and then another. When the time comes to cook his breakfast, he finds he isn’t hungry. Later he drives away without food in his stomach.
As more time passes, people notice; Mr Hilditch sees them noticing. In the canteen he picks at fricassee of lamb and Pineapple Surprise; he hardly touches the silverside, and is seen to help himself to a modest portion of his Wednesday favourite. Interviewing applicants for washing-up duties, he has several times to be reminded of names that have already been given to him. His teatime biscuit tin does not require replenishing for more than a fortnight. Driving home one evening, he runs out of petrol, a misfortune he later relates to his state of mind. He has to walk almost a mile, borrow a tin from a surly pump attendant, and put on a show of being amused at his own folly. Policemen from two squad cars have surrounded his small vehicle when he reaches it again, and retaining this mood of genial self-mockery he apologizes for any inconvenience he may have caused. The policemen are petulant and censorious. When he smiles at them they don’t respond. Useless men, importantly roaring about in their Fords and Vauxhalls, thick as walls. He smiles at them, and watches them driving off. From the moment she appeared on the forecourt in her red coat and her headscarf, he was generous to her. He listened, he did not once display fatigue. He assisted her with advice; he guided her and protected her, warning her against street criminals and the dangers of hitch-hiking. He gave her as much as he ever gave the others, begrudging her nothing. Did she pass all that on to the black woman? Is all that being said? And what besides? What elaborations added, what curiosity aroused? What titbits of gossip are there by now? Unsettled as he continues his interrupted journey, he goes over, yet again, all that was said on his doorstep. Later, in his big front room, he reflects how slight, how unimportant, it seemed when the Irish girl said she had been taken in by the people who are calling her a confidence trickster now. He turns the volume of his music up in an effort to stifle his worries and the black woman’s voice, and the whisper of inquisitiveness it feeds. That night he again sleeps fitfully, and has nightmares he can’t remember when he wakes up.
‘Oh yes, there’s been changes,’ the woman using the cash dispenser agrees, arranging four five-pound notes in the wallet of her purse. ‘Can’t say there hasn’t been changes.’ ‘No more than eight years of age,’ Mr Hilditch volunteers. ‘Used to come down on the train.’ ‘Out of all recognition in that case. No argument on that.’ She is a woman with spectacles, older than Mr Hilditch, with a basket on wheels, grey lisle stockings and a fuzzy grey coat. Her hair is grey and fuzzy also. ‘Thought I’d come back,’ Mr Hilditch continues, not yet inserting his plastic card in the cash dispenser. ‘Lift the spirits, I said to myself, to visit the Spa.’ ‘Nothing much of a spa about it these days. They packed that in donkeys ago.’ ‘The springs dried up, eh?’ ‘Never was no springs, some geezer fixed it. People’d believe anything in them days.’ ‘Mother did.’ ‘Well, there you go then. No more’n a con.’ ‘Mother said it did her good.’ ‘There’s a lot that’s in the mind when it comes to a sickness.’ ‘There probably is.’ ‘It was Len was a great believer in that. All in the mind was the expression he had for it.’ ‘Your husband would this be?’ ‘Late. 1970.’ Mr Hilditch presses his plastic into the slot and registers his personal identification number, 9165. The woman draws on grey gloves and seizes the handle of her mobile shopping basket. Notes to the value of forty pounds emerge from the wall. ‘A great convenience,’ Mr Hilditch remarks, agreeable to prolonging the encounter. ‘Our flexible friend.’ ‘You spend too much’s the only thing. If it wasn’t there you’d be better off.’ ‘Fancy a coffee?’ The woman hesitates. She doesn’t reply, but she raises no objection when Mr Hilditch falls into step with her. He couldn’t agree with her more, he declares; cash dispensers induce you to spend too much by making your money so readily available. The banks know what they’re doing, he suggests, and outside a store which he imagines will have a refreshment floor he repeats his invitation. ‘I’m not fussy,’ the woman says, preceding him through swing doors. It came to him in the early morning that he’d drive over to the Spa, the day being a Saturday. A change was what he needed, an outing to somewhere that belonged to some other time of his life. Two hours it took in the car; longer, with a change and a wait, it used to be by train. ‘Well, this is nice,’ he remarks with genuine enthusiasm when they are seated. ‘I enjoy a mid-morning cup.’ ‘It warms you, this weather.’ This woman is flattered: he can tell that by the way she looks about her to see if they have been noticed by anyone she knows. It was the same on the street. She would enjoy people speculating as to who the stranger is, a good ten years he could give her. He says: ‘I should have commiserated about your husband. Sorry about that.’ ‘It’s twenty-two years. You get over it.’ ‘Even so I should have said something.’ ‘No call for it really.’ ‘Even so I’m sorry.’ And since the subject is there, he states that he never married himself. ‘No more’ Vera did. Wouldn’t touch it, according to herself.’ ‘A daughter, is this?’ ‘A sister as was. We never got on, never saw eye to eye.’ Their coffee arrives. Mr Hilditch feels the first stirrings of appetite for several weeks and asks if there are cheese scones available. ‘I was up at all hours,’ he explains, apologetically, to his companion. ‘She wanted Len is my own belief, and when she couldn’t get him that was that. Wouldn’t touch it once she couldn’t get Len.’ In the course of further conversation Mr Hilditch voluntarily supplies his name, and the information that he is a catering manager. He gives the name of the town where he lives and works, adding that he was born there, population well over a quarter of a million these days and growing all the time. He butters three cheese scones while he is relaying this information, pleasurably watching the butter melt on the warm surface. Not once since he dropped into conversation with the greyly clad woman has he been harassed by the annoyance that keeps him awake at night and confuses him in the daytime. ‘It was always his ambition,’ she is saying now, ‘to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.’ ‘This is your husband, is it?’ ‘His great ambition and of course she played on it. Brazen in that respect. Read up on the subject – the names of the hanging plants or whatever it is they have.’ He nods understandingly. ‘I have to employ a lot for the kitchens. Any forward type of woman wouldn’t stand a chance. It’s one of the little rules I have.’ ‘The last words she spoke. “I’ll have him now,” she said. Brazen to the end.’ Soon after this the woman announces that she has to be getting on and, since the encounter cannot be further prolonged, Mr Hilditch smiles agreeably and says their meeting has been a pleasure. He remains at the table, buttering the last scone when the woman has passed out of sight. Almost immediately, the annoyance that her company has kept at bay returns. It accompanies Mr Hilditch as this day wears on, and the appetite that came back so briefly does not do so again. He distracts himself as best he can: it isn’t difficult to believe that some enterprising businessman once upon a time created a myth about a local water source, deluding the afflicted for generations. He thinks about that for a while, then slips into his private past. ‘That’s a public toilet,’ his mother pointed out the first time they came here, indicating a brick building near the railings of a park. ‘Remember where it is, dearie.’ She had a cameo brooch pinned to her lapel and a double necklace of pearls. She carried her bathing costume in a little blue suitcase, with the sandwiches she always brought, and a flask of tea. At the station buffet she had a gin and pep while they waited for the train, and another when they changed and had to wait again. Mr Hilditch attends the two o’clock showing of Basic Instinct and finds it unpleasant, but remains to the end since he has paid his money. Then he walks about the streets, admiring the terraces of pale, pretty houses with fanlights, the pillars that distinguish crescents and parades, the lofty statue of Queen Victoria in front of the town hall. But neither all that nor what remains with him of Basic Instinct is as efficacious as his companion of the morning in combating the intrusion that distresses him. As the shops begin to close, he judges the day a failure. Driving home again, he remembers Beth saying goodbye, the last moment before memory became too painful. She broke it to him suddenly: that tomorrow she planned to go south. Jakki said it first thing when he met her one evening, outside the home-decorating shop where they always met. Sharon didn’t tell him at all, and intended not to, but he guessed. Bobbi was the most casual. Elsie Covington said she’d miss him. Gaye cried, putting it on because she wanted money before she went.