23
In time Mr Hilditch returns to work. It is the best chance he has, he considers, of feeling himself again. He is welcomed in the kitchens and in the canteen and conscientiously devotes himself to the backlog in his small office. But his appetite has not returned, which continues to be something of an embarrassment for a catering manager. He explains it away as best he can, and it is generally remarked that he has not yet fully recovered from the ailment that laid him low for so long. Then, one afternoon, without warning, an adjustment occurs in his memory. Between the Irish girl’s going upstairs in her nightdress and the blue bus appearing on the drive of the stately home there emerges something else: there is the sound of footsteps on the stairs, of a door closing at the top of the house. In his recall there is his awareness that she knows, that there have been moments, that day and in the evening, when he saw the knowledge in her eyes. It is on a Tuesday that the remembrance occurs. The last day of March, twenty-five to four. Interrupted in his perusal of last month’s overheads, Mr Hilditch gazes at a calendar that hangs on his office wall and fails to register its familiar details: two children in Victorian dress blowing bubbles, the compliments of Trafalgar Soup Powders plc. The fragment of recall he experiences is more vividly projected than the scene that has been chosen by Trafalgar Soup Powders. He wept when she went upstairs again in her nightdress, already on her way to the beck and call of a father and two brothers, to a stifled life, to guilt on her conscience for ever more. The gramophone needle rasped on the record. The glow of the electric fire was pink on his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers. ‘A tea, Mr Hilditch,’ the tea woman offers. ‘I’ve brought it to you first.’ It is what the tea woman always says. He always gets his tea first, suitable treatment for a catering manager. ‘Thanks very much.’ He tries to smile and wonders if he succeeds. ‘Nice again,’ the tea woman comments, but he does not hear and so does not reply, which causes the tea woman later to remark that the malady that laid Mr Hilditch low has left him on the deaf side. His eyes drop from their sightless survey of the bubble-blowers on the wall. Print-outs cover the surface of his desk, the cup of tea on its saucer among them. He reaches out and mechanically stirs two lumps of sugar into the warm, milky liquid. On her way back to nothing, he repeated to himself in his big front room, on her way to a bleakness that would wither her innocence: what good was that to anyone? He called to her but she didn’t hear, and then he went upstairs to put it to her that they should go for a drive. All that comes back now.