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

Queally’s the agricultural-machinery depot on the Roscrea road.
‘Happen it’s out a bit.’ A man in a uniform hazards an opinion at the bus station, lips pursed in irritation because he doesn’t know. ‘Never heard of it, to tell the truth.’
She walks into the town, which has an older look than the town she has travelled from but with the same insignia on banks and stores. Streets amble and twist and turn, petering away to become lanes and alleys, the picturesque preserved as if in protest at the towers and chimneys that mar the town’s approaches. ‘Excuse me,’ Felicia interrupts a man in a wheelchair outside a teashop with small-paned windows that bulge out in a bow. ‘Push me in, dear,’ the man directs. ‘We’ll inquire inside.’
The cashier by the till asks a passing waitress if she knows where Thompson Castings is. The waitress shakes her head, but repeats the query to the people she’s serving. ‘Thompson’s,’ an elderly woman recalls. ‘Used to be in Half Street.’ But someone else says that was Thompson’s the leather people.
In a shop that sells electrical goods a briskly mannered man, grey-suited, knows at once: Thompson Castings was taken over by some larger concern two years ago. Another victim of the recession, this man asserts, no doubt about it. You can’t walk a yard without the recession impinging, tales of it everywhere. But when Felicia asks him if he knows what Thompson Castings is called now he says he’s stumped. On the streets again no one knows either.
So Felicia returns to the teashop with the bulging windows and sits over a cup of tea because they were helpful to her there. The tables all around her are full, with housewives and office employees who’ve slipped out for a moment; the waitresses hurry, chivvied by the cashier, who leaves her till from time to time in order to find people seats. The two women at Felicia’s table are talking about a third woman’s unsatisfactory marriage. They are smartly dressed and made up, seeming younger than perhaps they are, fortyish.
‘No one could put up with Garth,’ one of them declares, eyeing the fingers of shortbread that have been placed on the table. ‘Dire, that man is.’
‘You have knowledge of Garth, of course.’
‘You could say.’
She’s becoming used to the accent, Felicia realizes, listening to further exchanges about this husband. Her carrier bags are close to her chair, where she can see them when she glances down. She has removed from her handbag the banknotes the security man who interrogated her didn’t comment on, keeping only a few back: the bulk of them are stuffed into the arms of a jumper at the bottom of one of the carrier bags, safer there than in a handbag that might attract a thief. Connie Jo put her handbag down in a café in Dublin and when she turned to pick it up there wasn’t a sign of it.
‘You couldn’t live with stuff like that,’ the first woman maintains. ‘I always said it.’
‘Into swapping, the company Garth keeps. They offered her Bob Mather one time.’
‘They never did!’
‘Garth fancies Beryl Mather was at the root of that.’
‘Excuse me,’ Felicia asks the women. ‘Would you know what Thompson Castings is called now?’
They look at her, surprised.
‘What?’ one says.
Felicia repeats the question, and the other woman says there’s Thompson’s in Half Street.
‘The Thompson’s I’m after was taken over two years ago,’ Felicia explains. ‘They make lawn-mowers. The place in Half Street is different.’
The women shake their heads. One of them says she has a Flymo herself.
‘Only a friend of mine works there,’ Felicia explains. ‘I’m trying to find him.’
‘Could be anywhere,’ the woman who has a Flymo points out, reaching for a finger of shortbread.
‘I know.’
When the two women rise to go Felicia asks the waitress who scribbles out their bill, a different waitress from the one who was helpful before. ‘Half Street,’ this waitress says,