Free Felicia's Journey by William Trevor Page A

features in the shadows of the doorway.
‘It’s difficult, that. The girl wrote down the name and address on a notelet for me, but unfortunately I left it behind in the office. When the cleaners came on I was going to give them a ring and they’d read it out to me. But there’s no call for that if you’re not game for the early start.’
‘If you could just give me the name of the town –’
‘You’d be there for the duration, searching high and low.
    There’s upwards of a hundred and fifty works you’d have to investigate, more like two hundred. Still, maybe I’ll run into you again one of these days and I’ll pass the info on. I have to be going now, to see how Ada passed the day.’ He eases himself out of the doorway and begins to walk away.
Quickly Felicia says:
‘Could I have the lift?’
‘It’s six-thirty sharp on account of Ada having to be in the hospital first thing. Sorry about that.’
‘Six-thirty’s all right.’
‘We’ll pick you up down Marshring. Junction of Crescent and the Avenue.’
He smiles and nods. He won’t forget to ring the cleaners, he promises, then ambles off. Felicia watches his cumbersome form disappear into the car park before taking his place in the doorway, her glance again searching the crowd for Johnny Lysaght.

7
The house is silent and in darkness. No pet is there to witness the homecoming of its single occupant, not a goldfish or a bird. A key turns in the deadlock, a second one clicks in the Yale. The spacious hall is illuminated, the breathy sound of an aborted whistle begins.
Mr Hilditch hangs his mackintosh on the hall-stand, catching a single glimpse of himself in its octagonal mirror. Mechanically, he raises a hand to pat an area of his short hair. Other families’ ancestors regard him from the portraits he has purchased over the years, a strangers’ gallery that is no longer strange. In his kitchen he gathers together the ingredients of a meal.
The frisson of excitement that has been with him all day is charged with a greater surge now that he has spoken to the Irish girl again: never before has there been a girl as close to home as this one, a girl who actually approached him on the works premises. Elsie Covington cropped up in Uttoxeter, Beth in Wolverhampton, Gaye in Market Drayton. Sharon was Wigston; Jakki, Walsall. All of them, like the Irish girl, came from further afield and were heading elsewhere, anywhere in most cases. You make the rule about not soiling your own doorstep, not shopping locally, as the saying goes; you go to lengths to keep the rule in place, but this time the thing just happened. Fruit falling from a tree you haven’t even shaken; something meant, it feels like. And perhaps to do with being approached rather than the other way round, Mr Hilditch senses a promise: this time the relationship is destined to be special.
The snapshot memories begin again: weekend appearances in towns and places where no one knows he is Hilditch, a catering manager; hours spent in the car, watching from a vantage pointnear a disco that is due to end, or just parked anywhere on the off chance; up and down the motorways, alert on the approach roads in case there is another vehicle to keep close to; fatherly conversations with waitresses in bed-and-breakfast places, an invitation offered but not often accepted.
Mr Hilditch wonders if the breaking of his meticulously kept rule is in some way related to the fact that the Irish girl comes from so far away, a foreigner you might say, the first time there has been that. She is the ultimate in passing trade, more than just a new face for the A522 Burger King or the Forest East Services, or the Long Eaton Little Chef. Whatever the reason for his own behaviour, he finds himself exhilarated by the circumstances that have been presented to him, and only regrets that the ordained brevity of this relationship is an element in those circumstances also. Perhaps that, he reflects as he washes a pound of brussels