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 from dreams as they evaporate. ‘I’ve brought you a shell,’ Sister Benedict is saying, and a boy runs out in front of the Corpus Christi procession and someone waves from a window. Flanagan’s Quarries is on one of the lorries her brothers drive, parked by Myles Brady’s bar as the procession goes by. Passing Aldritt’s garage, you can see petrol vapour in the bright sunlight, a man filling his car at the pumps. ‘Angels flying low,’ Sister Francis Xavier says, but that isn’t something that began in a dream, although perhaps it came into one. Sister Francis Xavier said it whenever she referred to the Little Sisters who worked among the heathen of Africa. Just as the Reverend Mother used to tell how St Ursula set forth with her girl-companions, sailing the world because she wished to keep herself holy. ‘You never considered the celibate life, Felicia?’ the Reverend Mother inquired once, out of the blue. Afterwards, when she told them, Carmel and Rose said she had the face for a nun. When people went to the sea they brought her back shells because her mother had died. She arranged them on the chest of drawers in the bedroom she shared, but her great-grandmother kept knocking them off by accident so she kept them in one of her drawers instead. The first time she saw the sea herself was when she came on this journey.