Felicia's Journey Read Online Free PDF Page A

lifted inside. The houses that separate these solitary stores from one another are drab; discoloured concrete is dominant, the metal of skimpy window-frames rusting through its covering of paint. The prevalence of litter continues, blown in from the road or spilt out of dustbins, accumulating on a small expanse in front of each of the shops.
‘You didn’t have any luck?’ a voice says, and Felicia turns to find the fat man she asked directions of smiling at her from a car that is keeping pace with her, close to the edge of the pavement. The car comes to a halt when she stops herself, a small green vehicle with an old-fashioned humped back, so modest you’d hardly think the man would fit in it. He’s wearing a hat now; his features are shadowy in the gloom of the car’s interior.
She shakes her head. She understands what he says more easily than she understood the others: having to try so hard on the estate added to her tiredness.
‘No, it’s not there.’ A man wrote down the name of another town for her, she says, and takes the car salesman’s brochure from a pocket of her coat. He nods over it, commenting that the man may be right about that town. It’s the town where Thompson Castings is: he’d thought of Thompson’s himself five minutes after she’d gone. But she won’t get a bus in that direction tonight.
‘I’ll stay here so.’
‘You have somewhere?’
‘I’m just going to look for a place.’
Just before he spoke to her she’d decided to make inquiries about inexpensive lodgings. During the day she passed a bus station: they would know there, she’d thought, and was about to ask someone on the street to direct her to it when the car drew in beside her.
‘Marshring,’ the fat man says. ‘That’s where a lot of the accommodation is.’
She asks him where Marshring is and he says:
‘Straight ahead, second on the right. Left at the bottom, that’s Marshring. There’s the Crescent and the Avenue. Ten minutes’ walk.’
When she thanks him he nods and smiles. His glasses glint from the shadows as he turns his head away while still winding up the window.
‘Thanks again.’
Felicia moves on and eventually turns into the road that has been mentioned. She follows it down a hill to Marshring Crescent, where there are notices in most of the windows, offering overnightlodgings. Bed & breakfast with evening meal, £11 , one says. She pushes open a small ornamental gate and passes between two narrow areas of uncultivated garden. Then, wondering if she has closed the gate, she glances behind her to make sure. At the end of Marshring Crescent she notices what seems to be the humpbacked green car, but presumes she is mistaken.
    That night, at five minutes to twelve, Mr Hilditch slowly mounts the stairs to his bedroom.
His Uncle Wilf went to Ireland after the First World War. He went to settle the unrest, and came back with a story or two, nothing spectacular, just army tales. He died a dozen or so years ago at eighty-eight, still telling his army tales about skirmishes in France and Belgium, and reading the riot act in Ireland.
It was listening to his Uncle Wilf as a child that made Mr Hilditch want to join a regiment himself, an urge that increased as he grew older. But they wouldn’t take him when the moment came because of his eyesight and his feet. He pressed his application, having been eager for so long, thinking that maybe the quartermaster’s department or the cookhouse wouldn’t be particular, not knowing how these things were regulated. ‘Not a chance, old son,’ a recruiting sergeant said, a cold-faced little upstart with a black blade of a moustache. Ever since, the disappointment has remained, stuck there beyond its time.
Funny the way your thoughts go round, Mr Hilditch reflects. Funny the way they begin with a girl’s face lingering and then get back to Uncle Wilf and that recruiting sergeant. Number 19 she went into.

4
    Felicia wakes in the middle of the night, and fragments remain