In the kitchens and on the work floor a conclusion is reached. The catering manager, so affectionately part of everyday life for so long, suffered an illness of some mysterious nature: he took his life in the belief that the bewilderment of doctors indicated a grim prognosis. A collection is made in the canteen. A wreath is sent. The funeral is well attended. Notices outside 3 Duke of Wellington Road announce it is up for sale. ‘A useful property,’ a young estate agent remarks, showing prospective buyers around, adding that an auction will be held, that all the junk will go. Found parked on the gravel in front of the house, the car owned by the deceased has been disposed of already. All there is belongs to the state, there being no inheritor. ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ a police sergeant retorts when Miss Calligary insists that this same deceased, on his own admission, suffered from delusions. ‘He’d hardly have done it, miss, if he wasn’t in a state.’ ‘That man wasn’t what he seemed.’ ‘Happen he wasn’t, miss. Happen all sorts of things. But for the record what we have is that the gentleman is no longer with us.’ Miss Calligary mentions the Bible, inquiring if the sergeant ever has cause to consult it. She offers a brochure. For the one who dies there is a paradise earth, she promises, and adds that the deceased displayed an interest when this was pointed out to him, that he invited her young friend and herself into his house so that he could hear more about it. When all the time he was stealing money. ‘The Lord knows where that child is now,’ Miss Calligary adds. ‘We pray for her day and night.’ ‘You keep on at it,’ the sergeant breezily advises, and points out that he’s on the busy side this morning.
Other girls set out, on the run from a mess, or just wanting things to be different. Mysteries they’re called when they are noticed on their journey; and in cities, or towns large enough to have a trade in girls, the doors of Rovers and Volkswagens and Toyotas open to take them in. At Mr Caunce’s house they come and go. They try out the doorways of shops. There’s a first time for everything, they say, settling into this open-air accommodation. Missing persons for a while, they then acquire a new identity. Riff-raff they’re called now.
25
‘Have they closed the breakfast place?’ a man from the cardboard settlement inquires on the street. Yes, it’s closed, Felicia tells him, and he mutters a cacophony of curses, glaring furiously in the direction of a charity hall that is similar in all respects to the one Felicia was brought to, a long time ago, by Lena and George. She has queued for breakfasts in many since. ‘You have to get there early,’ she tells the man, but he ignores the admonition, continuing to swear to himself. When he ceases it is to ask the time. She doesn’t know. She sold her watch a while ago, with the cross she used to wear round her neck. She tried to sell her handbag but no one wanted it. It was Tapper who showed her how to dispose of the watch and the cross, to a friend he knew well and trusted. Forty pence she got; fairly good, that, Tapper said. The city she has come to, moving on from other cities and other towns, is no longer strange to her. She knows the way to the river and, as she walks towards it now, what comes into her head is Effie Holahan saying she saw the Virgin, and Carmel saying it was only a dream. Typical Effie, Carmel said, typical not to know the difference. Poor Effie with her dull eyes and her chilblains, and her way of dropping things! ‘Sure, doesn’t everyone have dreams like that?’ Carmel was scornful, and they all laughed, swinging their legs on the convent wall, and Effie Holahan was flustered, red as a sunset. It’s a long way away, that sitting on the convent wall; it’s further by ages than Lena and George; it’s history, as the voice in the police station said that day, which is ages ago also. Felicia doesn’t beg as she continues on her journey. At this time of day people don’t like being bothered because they’re in a hurry to get to work. She’s not in a hurry herself. The sun comes out, dispersing wispy clouds, warming her face and hair. With a bit of luck, it’ll dry the clothes that got wet last night. Ages ago, too, her first couple of carrier bags disintegrated; after careful examination, in case possibly they were of further use, their remains were thrown away. She has other bags now, five in all because she likes to collect things as she moves about. It’s surprising what people are finished with. Walking slowly, she nods over that, and what comes into her head is the first time Mr Logan opened his cinema, when he stood on the steps in his suit with the chalk line on it, and his blue bowtie. A masher, her father called Mr Logan, and she didn’t know what it meant until he told her. Cagey, her father said another time; cagey to gauge the entertainment business the way Mr Logan had, making a success of his dancehall and his cinema, still a bachelor in his fifties.
The Woman in Red the film was the night of the gala opening, and Rose said if Mr Logan was looking for a child bride she wouldn’t say no, and the girls on the wall, even Carmel, gasped to hear a thing like that. You have to move about. You get to know the windows of the shops, the streets in different weather, faces you’re always seeing, the H. Samuel clock, post-office clocks and clock-tower clocks, the parking-meter women, the obstruction of scaffolding on the pavement, red-and-white plastic ribbons to warn you, the street lights coming on. You move about because you want to, the bits and pieces coming into your head. Hail Mary, full of Grace: the first time she repeated it she felt grown up, the beads cold to the touch, smooth in her fingers. Blessed art thou amongst women… The votive light on the stairwall never went out, a red speck in the dark, a tiny glow you could overlook in the daytime because you were used to it. Her father stood for the Soldier’s Song whenever it was played, still as a statue while people shuffled away, particular about that he was. God’s will, he called it, the day her mother died, and her brothers wore black diamonds on their sleeves, sewn in by Mrs Quigly. The sun shone, the day of the funeral; they were back in the house by twelve, before the Angelus. ‘The cross we bear,’ Mrs Quigly said on another day. ‘Every month a reminder.’ Yeah, definitely, Carmel said. ‘Every blooming month.’ And Rose said calmly what’s wrong with an older man if he brings home the bacon? People collect cartons of coffee from a take-away: office-workers, girls with their make-up fresh and bright, young men in long coats, belts tied at the back. They march along the streets she dawdles in, stepping round her, one man conversing on a telephone he carries with him. A plate-glass window is being replaced, the new glass not yet taken from the clamps on the side of a van. Five workmen stand ready to lift it into place when the timber sheet that covers the damage has been removed. A passing taxi driver greets one of them, shouting a joke. ‘Hullo, Felicia.’ She is greeted herself, by an Indian who’s arranging fruit on the stalls outside his shop. He always speaks to her when she passes if he isn’t busy with a customer. He gave her some kiwi fruit when he was packing up his wares one evening, because it wouldn’t last the night, he said. She doesn’t know his name. Last night a woman she begged from in this street said no, then changed her mind and broke open a sliced loaf in her shopping-bag. Have that instead, she said, offering four slices, saying she knew for a fact that any money given would be spent on drink. Felicia didn’t contradict the assumption; you get used to what people say to you; it doesn’t matter. She knows she is not as she was; she is not the bridesmaid at the autumn wedding, not the girl who covered herself with a rug in the back of a car. The innocence that once was hers is now, with time, a foolishness, yet it is not disowned, and that same lost person is valued for leading her to where she is. Walking through another morning, fine after a wet night, she accepts without bewilderment the serenity that possesses her, and celebrates its fresh new presence. She dropped the bar of the fire-grate because her hands were nervous; she turned the light on because she was fumbling at the hall door, unable to find where the latch was. She didn’t think she’d get away; she prayed it would not be painful, that when it happened it would be swift. The novice at the convent said your mother’s waiting for you in heaven, Felicia; she thought of that as she turned the Yale latch. And then the light from the open hall door illuminated the fog, only just reaching the small green car on the gravel. He was bent over the steering wheel, crouching away from the light that had come on, covering his face. When she ran, the car didn’t follow her. But the strings of the carrier bags cut into her fingers because she was hurrying so, not holding them the way she’d taught herself to. The houses were shrouded, the street lights blurred; her feet made the only sound there was until she reached the wide main road where traffic thudded and headlights were dim before they burst out of the fog, white or yellow. ‘Hardly saw you,’ the driver of the lorry said, and later added that he had two daughters of his own, his crinkly hair grey in the light of the cab when he drew in to dissolve an Oxo cube in his flask. On the steps of some building in the town near where he dropped her she watched the sky lightening; the fog was gone then. A woman, raving, sat beside her for a while, and a street-cleansing vehicle crept by, hosing and brushing as it moved. When it was quiet again, sparrows sang. ‘We was married one time,’ the woman confided. ‘Benny Hill it was.’ Voices spoke to the woman, Benny Hill, Gary Glitter. ‘Lovely, them boys. Do anything for you, dear.’ Thrown into a bin attached to a lamppost, a coffee carton miraculously remains upright, the liquid it contains unspilt. Felicia drinks it, and finds most of a muffin still stuck to the paper it was baked in. ‘Young for a bag lady, ain’t you?’ someone going by said two days ago, and she said yes, liking to agree. ‘Cheers,’ an old man greeted her last night, tidy in an overcoat and hat, stepping out of the crowd to tell her she looked like Marilyn Monroe, swaying because he had a few drinks in. ‘Santa Ponsa,’ a girl says now. ‘Fantastic!’ And a man drops a section of a newspaper, the pages slipping from beneath his arm. Someone else calls out, shouting to the man that he has lost his paper, but the man says it’s only the Sport and Business. Felicia picks the pages up because they may be useful later on. ‘Can’t stand that Lovejoy,’ another girl says, and her companion argues, insisting that Lovejoy’s sexy. A shop window is full of wigs and beards and false moustaches.