Free Felicia's Journey by William Trevor

me. No better than dirt, that woman you’re going to.” I held the knife out to him, but he didn’tmove. So I lifted it myself and I watched him watching me. And then the point broke the flesh and I pulled it down hard.’
Mrs Lysaght turned and left the kitchen when she’d said that, and Felicia followed her.
‘If I gave you a letter would you send it on for me, Mrs Lysaght?’
The front door was opened, and since no reply had come Felicia repeated her request. She would stamp the envelope, she promised. All that was necessary was that it should be addressed.
‘Very well,’ Mrs Lysaght agreed at last.
But when ten days, and then a fortnight, passed without a reply Felicia knew that the letter had not been sent. It had not been sent because his mother hated her. Johnny was being stolen from his mother, in the same way as a woman had stolen her husband: that was how his mother saw it. She’d have read the letter and probably burnt it.
As she moves from where she has been standing by the refreshment kiosk, Felicia wonders if his mother guesses where she is now; and, knowing, if she hates her more. She wonders if his mother mentioned the visit when she wrote to him herself, and thinks she wouldn’t have. Why should she, since it’s not in her interest, since there’s nothing to be gained? He never said his mother wasn’t well; it explained his solicitude for her.
‘I was worried about you,’ a voice says, and the bespectacled face of the fat man who helped her yesterday is there in a doorway. He speaks softly, his expression full of the concern he refers to, his sudden presence, and what he says, bewildering Felicia. During the course of the day, he goes on, he has made inquiries about Thompson Castings and learned that she has been misled. He was so upset that he asked around and in the end tracked down the only factory within a reasonable distance that filled the bill. They did a mower with a Briggs and Stratton engine there, the bodywork cast in the works, Sheffield blades, rotary or cylinder.
‘I think it’s what you’re looking for,’ he says. ‘I phoned up Ada from the office and she said to drop by the bus station in case I caught a sight of you coming back. When I told Ada last nightwhat your problem was she was worried to think of you wandering about.’
He is pressed back in one corner of the doorway, shop windows displaying shoes on either side of him. His voice is no more than a whisper, not like it was when she accosted him yesterday to ask if she’d come to the right place, or when he called out from his car at her. Ada is his wife, he says, a caring woman.
‘The only thing is it’s a good fifty miles away.’
She begins to shake her head, but he says there are lots living locally who make a journey like that every day. No reason why her friend wouldn’t. A girl in the office checked the whole thing out: up to sixty-odd miles people travel every day.
‘They’d go to business in a locality like the one you drew a blank in today, or this one I’m mentioning. Coming back here for nights.’
‘Yes, I understand. I worked that out.’
He is whistling beneath his breath, a soft breeze on his lips, soundless almost. It ceases when he speaks again.
‘What I wanted to tell you,’ he explains, ‘is that the wife and myself have to drive up that way in the morning. What I’m saying is you’d be welcome to a seat in bur little jalopy.’ He laughs, the excess flesh on his face and neck quivering and then settling again.
‘Oh, I don’t think I –’
‘No, of course you wouldn’t. Naturally you wouldn’t. It’s just that Ada said I should mention it. But I reminded her it’s an early start. You probably wouldn’t want an early start.’
‘Your wife –’
‘Ada’s poorly. We have to drop her into a hospital up there. Specialist stuff.’
‘If you could just give me the name of the factory,’ Felicia begins to say, but is interrupted at once by the doubt that spreads through the plump