Read Online Felicia's Journey by William Trevor - Free Book Online Page A

the others – making up the sentences while she went about the shops or performed her household tasks – had been a consolation; once written down, the trouble she recorded now – not shared with anyone – acquired an extra dread. As she lay there sleepless after she’d completed the letter, she tried to think of better words than the words she’d used, some softer way of putting it. But all there was was the church bell striking one o’clock, then two and three and four, and the old woman’s watery gurgling, the bedsprings creaking as movement was attempted, the sudden gasp and then the breathing becoming regular again. When she was younger Felicia used to fear that her great-grandmother would die while she slept, that she’d be white and motionless in the morning, dead eyes staring.
Among the waiting buses, the melancholy of that long night returns and Felicia’s spirits are as low as they were then – lower than on the ferry or in the desolate room where the security man interrogated her, or when she woke up on the train and didn’t know where she was, lower than when the policeman said a needle in a haystack. Still searching among the faces around her, she again experiences the sense of punishment she was first aware of the night she wrote the last of her letters: a call to order, a call to account for the happiness she had so recklessly indulged in. ‘Don’t worry about that side of things,’ he had reassured her once, as they hurried through the Mandeville woods. ‘All that’s taken care of bymyself.’ Her face went red when he said it, but she was glad he had. ‘There’s nothing wrong in it,’ he murmured, saying more, nothing wrong in it when two people love one another. Yet the night she wrote the letter she felt that maybe, after all, there had been: the old-fashioned sin you had to confess if you went to Confession; the sin of being greedy, the sin of not being patient. And why should she have supposed that the happiness his love had given her was her due, and free?
If she goes back now she’ll wake up again in that bedroom. There’ll be another dawn breaking on the same despair, the weariness of getting up when the bell chimes six, another day beginning. The cramped stairs will again be cleaned on Tuesdays, the old woman’s sheets changed at the weekend. If she goes back now her father’s eyes will still accuse, her brothers will threaten revenge. There will be Connie Jo’s regret that she married into a family anticipating a shameful birth. There will be interested glances, or hard looks, on the street. God, you fool, Carmel will say, and Rose will say were you born yesterday?
Only being together, only their love, can bring redemption: she knows that perfectly. She knew it when Christmas passed and he did not return. She knew it during the snow that came in January; she knew it when the first week of February came gustily in, when she went to see his mother. ‘I’m a friend of Johnny’s, Mrs Lysaght’: standing now with her carrier bags, hopelessly looking about her, she hears the echo of her nervousness, a stutter in her voice.
Is it being so separated from its reality that lends the recollection such potency, distance sharpening the ordinary trudge of time? His mother’s stare, cold with suspicion and distrust, his mother at first saying nothing, seeming ready to close her front door on a whim. His mother asking her what she wanted, a dull inquisitiveness developing. The door held open then; the narrow passage, the way led to the kitchen. ‘Yes?’ his mother said, the white thread of the scar beneath her eye more noticeable in the better light. Bitter as a sloe, people called this woman.
The crowd is dwindling in the bus station, but Felicia still stands where she has taken up her position, by a refreshment kiosk that has closed. No buses are arriving now and only a few remain,waiting to set off. As clearly as she sees them, there are also the two figures in his mother’s