Felicia's Journey
William Trevor
PENGUIN BOOKS
FELICIA’S JOURNEY
‘Felicia’s Journey is a masterpiece, one of the finest novels from the contemporary writer I have no doubt at all is simply the best we have … you read and are dazzled by how good it is … It has also one of the most memorable and convincing, most sinister and terrifying of characters created in the modern world, a character of truly Dickensian proportions’ Susan Hill, speaking at the Whitbread Novel Award ceremony
‘A quietly passionate tale saturated in despair … Trevor’s language is spot-on … he is a compassionate, but stern and unforgiving judge’ Geraldine Brennan in the Observer
‘This novel exhibits how emotional and psychological injury horribly incubates more injury … Trevor has never written with more humane energy and baleful bravura than he does in this elegy for unfortunates’ Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times
‘There is always more in William Trevor than a finely crafted story. His uncanny use of detail is piercingly visual … the closing sentence brings from the reader a satisfied sigh’ Brian Masters in the Literary Review
‘Masterly in its tension’ Thomas Kilroy in the Irish Times
‘It is a mark of Trevor’s great imaginative resources that he opens deep chambers of horror without ever describing an act of violence’ Anthony Quinn in the Independent
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Trevor was born in 1928 at Mitchelstown, County Cork, spent his childhood in provincial Ireland, and now lives in Devon. He attended a number of Irish schools and later Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He has written many novels, including The Old Boys (1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize; The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and Fools of Fortune (1983), both winners of the Whitbread Fiction Award; The Silence in the Garden (1988), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Two Lives (1991), which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker-shortlisted novella Reading Turgenev, Felicia’s Journey (1994), which won both the Whitbread and Sunday Express Book of the Year Awards; Death in Summer. (1998); and, most recently, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), which was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Award. A celebrated short-story writer, his most recent collections are After Rain (1996); The Hill Bachelors, which won the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Irish Times Literature Prize; and A Bit on the Side (2004). He is also the editor of The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989). He has written plays for the stage and for radio and television; several of his television plays have been based on his short stories. Most of his books are available in Penguin.
In 1976 William Trevor received the Allied Irish Banks Prize, and in 1977 he was awarded an honorary CBE in recognition of his valuable services to literature. In 1992 he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime’s literary achievement. And in 2002, he was knighted for his services to literature.
Many critics and writers have praised his work: to Hilary Mantel he is ‘one of the contemporary writers I most admire’ and to Carol Shields ‘a worthy chronicler of our times’. In the Spectator Anita Brookner wrote, ‘These novels will endure. And in every beautiful sentence there is not a word out of place’, and John Banville believes William Trevor’s novels to be ‘among the most subtle and sophisticated fiction being written today’.
FELICIA’S JOURNEY
William Trevor
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Viking 1994
Published in Penguin Books 1995
27
Copyright © William Trevor, 1994
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted Lines from ‘Sentimental Journey’ by Bud Green, and Les Brown and Ben Homer, Warner Chappell Music Ltd, London WIY 3FA. Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192888-3
For Jane
1
She keeps being sick. A woman in the washroom says:
‘You’d be better off in the fresh air. Wouldn’t you go up on the deck?’
It’s cold on the deck and the wind hurts her ears. When she has been sick over the rail she feels better and goes downstairs again, to where she was sitting before she went to the washroom. The clothes she picked out for her journey are in two green carrier bags; the money is in her handbag. She had to pay for the carrier bags in Chawke’s, fifty pence each. They have Chawke’s name on them, and a Celtic pattern round the edge. At the bureau de change she has been given English notes for her Irish ones.
Not many people are travelling. Shrieking and pretending to lose their balance, schoolchildren keep passing by where she is huddled. A family sits quietly in a corner, all of them with their eyes closed. Two elderly women and a priest are talking about English race-courses.
It is the evening ferry; she wasn’t in time for the morning one. ‘That’s Ireland’s Eye,’ one of the children called out not long after the boat drew away from the quayside, and Felicia felt safe then. It seems a year ago since last night, when she crept with the carrier bags from the bedroom she shares with her great-grandmother to the backyard shed, to hide them behind a jumble of old floorboards her father intends to make a cold frame out of. In the morning, while the old woman was still sleeping, she waited in the shed until the light came on in the kitchen, an indication that her father was back from Heverin’s with the Irish Press. Then she slipped out the back way to the Square, twenty-five minutes early for the 7.45 bus. All the time she was nervous in case her father or her brothers appeared, and when the bus started to move she squinted sideways out of the window, a hand held up to her face. She kept telling herself that they couldn’t know about the money yet, that they wouldn’t even have found the note she’d left, but none of that was a help.
For a while Felicia sleeps, and then goes to the washroom again. Two girls are putting on deodorant, passing the roll-on container to one another, the buttons of their shirts undone. ‘Sorry,’ Felicia says when she has been sick, but the girls say it doesn’t matter. There can’t be much left inside her, she thinks, because she hasn’t had much to eat that day. ‘Take a drink of water,’ one of the girls advises. ‘We’ll be in in twenty minutes.’ The other girl asks her if she is OK, and she says she is. She brushes her teeth and a woman beside her picks up the toothbrush when she puts it down on the edge of the basin. ‘God, I’m sorry!’ the woman apologizes when Felicia protests. ‘I thought it was the ship’s.
’
Typical of her to go out somewhere at a peculiar time like this, her father would have said when she wasn’t there to assist with the breakfast frying; typical of the way she is these days. He wouldn’t have found the note until he went in with the old woman’s breakfast. ‘She’s taken herself off,’ he’d have told her brothers and there wouldn’t have been time to talk about it before her brothers left for the quarries. She wonders if he went to the Guards; he mightn’t have wanted to do that in spite of everything, you never knew with him. But he’d have had to call in next door to ask Mrs Quigly to keep an eye on the old woman during the day, to give her her cream crackers and half a tin of soup at twelve, the way Mrs Quigly always used to when Felicia was still working in the meat factory.
Announcements are made. There’s a flutter of activity among the passengers, suitcases gathered up, obedient congregating in a designated area. A blast of cold air sweeps in when the doors are opened for disembarkation, and then the small throng moves forward on to the gangway. In the evening, when her father and her brothers had returned to the house, they’d have sat in the kitchen, with the note on the table, her father shaking his head slowly and mournfully, as if he in particular had been harshly treated: everything was always worst for her father. One of her brothers would have said he’d go down to McGrattan Street to tell Aidan, and whichever one it was would have called in at Myles Brady’s bar on the way back. Her father would have cooked the old woman’s supper and then their own, stony-faced at the stove.
Felicia’s nervousness returns as she passes with the other passengers into a bleak, unfurnished building in which a security officer questions her. ‘Have you means of identification?’ he demands.
‘Identification?’
‘What’s your name?’
Felicia tells him. He asks if she has a driver’s licence.
‘I can’t drive actually.’
‘Have you another form of identification?’
‘I can’t think that I have.’
‘No letter? No documentation of any kind?’
She shakes her head. He asks if she is resident in the UK and she says no, in Ireland.
‘You’re here on a visit, are you, miss?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what’s the purpose of this visit?’
‘To see a friend.’
‘And you’re travelling on to where?’
‘The Birmingham area. North of Birmingham.’
‘May I look through your bags for a moment? Would you mind just stepping aside, miss?’
He pokes about among her clothes and the extra pair of shoes she has brought. She thinks he’ll comment when he comes across the banknotes in her handbag, but he doesn’t.
‘I’ll just jot down the address of your friend,’ he says. ‘Would you give me that, please?’
‘I don’t know it. I have to find him yet.’
‘He’s not expecting you?’
‘He’s not really.’
‘You’re sure you’ll find him?’
‘I will, through his place of work.’
Her interrogator nods. He is a man of about the same age as her father, with a featureless face. He is wearing a black overcoat, open at the front.
‘I’ll just jot down your address in Ireland,’ he says.
She says she is from Mountmellick, the first town that comes into her head. She gives an address she makes up: 23 St Mary’s Terrace.
‘Right,’ the security man says.
No one stops her at the Customs. She asks where the trains go from, and is directed. When she makes further inquiries she is informed that the train for Birmingham isn’t due to leave until a quarter past two. It is now just after midnight.
For a while, in the waiting-room, she sleeps. She dreams: that she is shopping for meat in Scaddan’s, that Mr Scaddan thumps a huge cut of liver on to the weighing-scales and says he took it out of the bullock himself. This isn’t true; in her dream she is aware that it isn’t; Mr Scaddan is well known for his tall stories. One of the young Christian Brothers comes into the shop and Mr Scaddan says it is a disgrace, but she doesn’t know what the butcher is talking about. ‘I was out for a walk one night,’ he says to the Christian Brother. ‘Down by the old gasworks.’ She knows then.
The train comes in, long before it’s due to go out again. Felicia makes certain it is the right one, and when the journey begins she falls asleep again. Wakened by the ticket-collector, she is drowsily confused for a moment, not knowing where she is. The man is patient while she searches in her handbag for her ticket. Her mother’s calm features are snagged in her consciousness, the residue of another dream.
‘Thank you,’ the man says, passing on.
The dream about her mother has gone; but although she cannot recall what it was about, it has stirred her memory. ‘Hurry now, for Mrs Quigly,’ her great-grandmother ordered her that day, ages ago. ‘And tell Father Kilgallen he’s wanted quickly.’ The old woman was holding a cup of tea to her mother’s lips and her mother’s eyes were half closed; her cheeks were the colour of cement. ‘Mrs Quigly! Mrs Quigly!’ She was six that day, banging the letter-box of the house next door. Later she had to run to keep up with Father Kilgallen’s urgent stride in Main Street and the Square, and when they got to the house Mrs Quigly and the old woman helped her mother into the bedroom. Father Kilgallen whispered there, and then her brothers came in from the Christian Brothers’ and Aidan went to get her father from the convent garden. It was her father who drew the sheet over her mother’s face, a last few minutes he had with her while they waited in the kitchen and Aidan cried. The satchel with her schoolbooks in it was on the floor where she had dropped it, light-blue and shiny, Minnie Mouse with pink shoes on the flap. ‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Quigly said, taking her apron off after she’d crossed herself, the flowers on it too garish now. ‘Thank God,’ Father Kilgallen said because he had arrived in time. ‘I’ve outlived another one,’ the old woman said.
The train judders on, rattling on the rails, slowing almost to a halt, gathering speed again. Felicia opens her eyes. A hazy dawn is distributing farmhouses and silos and humped barns in shadowy fields. Later, there are long lines of motor cars creeping slowly on nearby roads, and blank early-morning faces at railway stations. Pylons and aerials clutter a skyline, birds scavenge at a rubbish tip. There’s never a stretch of empty countryside.
The train fills up. Newspapers are read in silence, eyes that meet by accident at once averted. Everything – people and houses and motorcars, pylons and aerials – are packed together as if there isn’t quite enough room to accommodate them. Faces acquire an edginess when the train threatens to stop even though it isn’t at a station.
Johnny will be going to work, too: Felicia imagines him, hurrying as everyone else is, but carefree, not worrying about it, because that is his way. For as long as she can she retains an image of his easy-going expression, then of his profile the afternoon he took the bus himself, the last time she saw him, when he didn’t know she was still in the Square; as a faraway, whispering echo, there is the murmur of his voice.
2
Although he does not know it, Mr Hilditch weighs nineteen and a half stone, a total that has been steady for more than a dozen years, rarely increasing or decreasing by as much as a pound. Christened Joseph Ambrose fifty-four years ago, Mr Hilditch wears spectacles that have a pebbly look, keeps his pigeon-coloured hair short, dresses always in a suit with a waistcoat, ties his striped tie into a tight little knot, polishes his shoes twice a day, and is given to smiling pleasantly. Regularly, the fat that bulges about his features is rolled back and well-kept teeth appear, while a twinkle livens the blurred pupils behind his spectacles. His voice is faintly high-pitched.
Mr Hilditch’s hands are small, seeming not to belong to the rest of him: deft, delicate fingers that can insert a battery into a watch or tidily truss a chicken, this latter a useful accomplishment, for of all things in the world Mr Hilditch enjoys eating. Often considering that he h
as not consumed sufficient during the course of a meal, he treats himself to a Bounty bar or a Mars or a packet of biscuits. The appreciation of food, he calls it privately.
Once an invoice clerk, Mr Hilditch is now, suitably, a catering manager. Fifteen years ago, when his predecessor in this position retired, he was summoned by the factory management and the notion of a change of occupation was put to him. As he well knew, the policy was that vacancies, where possible, should be filled from within, and his interest in meals and comestibles had not gone unnoticed; all that was necessary was that he should go on a brief catering course. For his part, he was aware that computers were increasingly taking their toll of office staff and when the offer was made he knew better than to hesitate: as a reward for long and satisfactory service, redundancy was being forestalled.
Mr Hilditch occupies on his own a detached house standing in shrubberies that run all around it, Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road. In 1979 his mother died in this house; he never knew his father. Left on his own at the time of the death, he committed to auction the furniture that had accumulated in his mother’s lifetime and from then on made Number Three solely his. Visiting salerooms at weekends, he filled it with articles, large and small, all of them to his personal taste: huge mahogany cupboards and chests, ivory trinkets for his mantelpieces, secondhand Indian carpets, and elaborately framed portraits of strangers. Twenty mezzotints of South African military scenes decorate the staircase wall, an umbrella-stand in marble and mahogany vies for pride of place with a set of antlers in a spacious hallway. Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road is commodious enough to contain all Mr Hilditch has purchased: built in 1867 to the designs of a tea merchant, it spreads from this lofty entrance hall to kitchen and pantries at the back, and reception rooms of generous proportions to the left and right of the hall door. Upstairs, that generosity is repeated. Four bedrooms open off the first-floor landing, with a further four above them. Ceilings are rich in plasterwork mouldings and cornices. Ornate gas lamps, no longer in use, still protrude from the walls. Mr Hilditch regularly dusts them, an attention that over the years has resulted in a dull glow on the protuberances of the decoration. In spring and summer he attends to the shrubberies, keeping them clear of weeds, though not growing anything new. He sweeps up the fallen leaves in autumn and from time to time repairs the wooden boundary fences.
