The Travelling Man (23 page)

‘We’ll be there waiting to be picked up at the time you suggest,’ she was saying. ‘The four of us.’ She was bobbing about on the seat like a young girl. ‘I don’t suppose you remember young Annie Clancy? Used to live in the same street as me.’

The carrier raised his eyebrows. ‘Seeing as ’ow I dropped her off along this very stretch of road, I should remember her. Poor little beggar. I couldn’t get a word out of her that day, though she told me she was going to work for a couple with a new bairn in one of those cottages over there.’ He pointed with his whip. ‘You can see the smoke rising up by that line of trees. Shall I stop for you to have a proper look?’

‘No need. We know she didn’t end up there.’

‘Poor little beggar,’ said Mick Malone, sitting up straight with his cap clutched tight in his ham-shank hands. ‘It must have taken her the best part of a day to walk to where she did end up.’

‘She’ll be safe now,’ Miss Morris said, and actually patted one of Mick’s corduroyed knees. ‘The Lord is guiding us to her, Mick.’

‘Amen,’ said Mick, his beer-stained moustache quivering with an emotion that the carrier mistrusted with every fibre of his being.

‘She’s there, Mick! She’s there!’

Edith had thought the climb up the rough winding road to the farm at the top would finish her off. The searching wind had already whipped her hat half off and whirled her skirts up round her ankles. She stopped to catch her breath and pointed to where a small girl was scattering feed to a dozen or so scrawny hens.

‘See, there she is! Annie!’ Her normal reserve tossed on the wind, Edith ran off the road and across the field, holding out her arms. ‘Annie! It’s me, Miss Morris. Come to take you home …’

But the slightly built young girl turning round to face them wasn’t Annie. Was nothing like Annie.

This girl had a tiny wizened face of a heartbroken monkey. But she was wearing a blouse Edith had seen before, made out of a remnant of black cloth patterned with blue circles. She even remembered Annie’s mother coming home in triumph from the market with the yard and a half of material marked down to sixpence.

‘You’re wearing Annie Clancy’s clothes!’ Edith’s voice rang out like a clarion call. ‘Where is she?’ She grabbed a wrist as thin as a twig. ‘Why are you wearing clothes that don’t belong to you? Who are you?’

With a surprising strength the girl upped with her boot and gave Edith a kick that sent her sprawling, gathered up her skirts and ran, head bent, towards the farmhouse.

Mick helped Edith to her feet, brushing her muddied skirts down with his hand, looking with dismay into her white face and her eyes wide and black with shock.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ he soothed. ‘Come away with me now, Miss. This is a terrible place to be. It’s not for the likes of you. Just you get yourself down to the bottom road, and leave me to deal with them evil sods up at the farm.’ He balled huge hands into fists. ‘If Barney Eccles has laid as much as a finger on your young Annie I’ll smash his ugly mug to a bloody pulp. I’ll separate his breath from his body, Jaysus that I will.’

Edith flinched, but there was time enough to correct his unfortunate use of blasphemy. All she knew was that she wasn’t for letting the big fella go up to the farm on his own.

‘Follow me, Mick,’ she ordered, leading the way. ‘Remember the Lord is with us, so we have nothing to fear.’

‘No, Miss Morris.’

Mick looked up at the lowering sky and crossed himself. As an extra precaution.

No matter that she went back down the hill a lot faster than she’d gone up it. No matter that Lily Eccles was waving her arms about and shouting obscenities at them, yelling that it was the second time her husband had been felled with a single blow. First by Seth Armstrong and now by Mick, leaving his eyes rolling in his head as he lay stunned and bloodied on the floor.

‘What’s he supposed to have done?’ she screamed. ‘He never laid a finger on Annie Clancy. I can vouch for that. What the ’ell is he supposed to have done?’

‘The wicked shall fall by his own wickedness!’ Edith turned to shout back at her. ‘They shall perish … they shall be as the fat of lambs; they shall consume; into smoke shall they consume away!’

But after that Mick could see that the wind and fire seemed to have gone from her.

‘What a silly woman I am.’

‘That you’re not, Miss.’

‘I am, Mick. How could I be foolish enough to think that Annie would be there with her baby, ready to run upstairs to get her things the minute I stepped over the doorstep.’ She shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘She was always such a bright, loving girl. Now God alone knows where she is. You must think I’m a proper gobbin.’

They were sitting side by side on a low stone wall waiting for the carrier’s cart. Mick thought that Miss Morris suited her hair all wispy like that, with little curly bits escaping from the neat little bun. Couldn’t she see that he felt it a privilege just to be out with her? As for her being a gobbin, nay, the only gobbin sat on that wall was himself.

‘You’ll find Annie one of these days, Miss. She can’t have run far without her bloody belongings.’

‘Don’t swear in front of me, please, Mick. There’s always better words to use than swear ones.’ Edith turned and spoke directly to the glowing nose. ‘Though I can’t thank you enough for sticking up for me in front of that terrible man, and that dirty woman.’

Mick spat on his swollen knuckles and gave them a good rub on a trouser leg. ‘I’ve allus wanted the chance of giving Barney Eccles a good pasting. He’s known for miles around for being a bad lot. There’s more little butter-nobs running round the countryside than you’ve had hot dinners.’

‘Mick!’

‘Sorry, Miss.’ Somehow he couldn’t wipe the smile off his face.

Miss had asked him to stop to his tea last night after she’d given him his reading lesson, and a wonderful meal it had been. His mouth watered at the memory of it. First Miss had piled his plate with tater pie, with a crust on it that melted in the mouth, then she’d given him a dish of creamy rice pudding thick with sultanas and a nice topping of nutmeg to give the brown skin a bit of flavour. To go with his pot of tea, she’d buttered him a decent sized wedge of oven-bottom cake.

Was he wicked for being glad they weren’t taking Annie Clancy back with them? Miss Morris would have no time for him with young Annie and a baby there. He plucked a blade of grass and began to chew on it, wrinkling his forehead in an agony of concentration. Barney Eccles had laughed his socks off when Miss had mentioned a baby. Told her there’d never been one. Roaring and yelling, slapping his thighs, he had laughed till tears came in his blood-shot eyes. It was then that Mick had come to the conclusion that force might have to be used. He spat on the bruised knuckles on his right hand. He had no idea how things would turn out. For Miss’s satisfaction he had searched every corner of the farmhouse, but Annie Clancy wasn’t there. He believed Barney’s wife when she insisted that Annie had
run
away. Nobody should linger in a place like that. He glanced sideways at Miss.

‘It pained me to see you in yon house,’ he said. ‘You were like a rose in a muck-midden.’

She smiled at him, patted his arm, making Mick want to leap from the wall and go running down the lane, waving his arms about like the true gobbin he was. Not much had ever gone right for Mick Malone, but there was one thing he knew – that never, in the whole of his bloody life had he been as happy as he was at that moment. Pardon his French, of course.

The long summer months lay ahead of him, filled with Miss giving him lessons, talking to him across plates of steaming tater pie about the love of Jesus. He’d landed butter side up this time, right enough.

In September the leaves on Adam’s rose bushes curled in on themselves and were tipped with brown. In the far meadow crane-flies with wings of gauze and trailing legs hung suspended in the still air.

On a warm day Annie saw a bat in swooping flight as she walked back from taking Adam’s dinner to the big barn where he was helping to stack the bales of straw for winter feeding. Clara said that seeing the bat was a bad sign, and later in the afternoon she remarked that the sun was going pale to bed. ‘So ’twill rain tomorrow, it is said.’ She gave an extra deep sigh.

In the past weeks the flesh seemed to have dropped from her. She wore her neck shawl all day, coughed her hard dry cough, and when Annie tried to feed her, turned her head away so that the sweetened gruel ran in rivulets down her chin.

‘I’ve not long to go,’ she said, over and over again. ‘I won’t be here at Christmas,’ she warned. ‘You promise me you’ll stay with Adam till then?’

Promises, promises.

One misty morning Clara asked to be helped upstairs to her bed, lay down on it with a quiet resignation and
quietly
died. Adam was distraught, totally bewildered. He stood at the foot of the bed and stared at his wife lying there with the colour drained from her cheeks, her hands crossed over the front of her best nightgown.

‘She told me that often she was on her last,’ he said, ‘but somehow I never thought it would happen.’ He banged his fist on the bed-rail. ‘You know why she died? You know why we never had no children? Because she was dragged up, not brought up, that’s why!’ The collie dog crept into the room to nuzzle his nose into Adam’s hand. ‘The wife was half-starved when I first saw her.’ His voice was choked with tears. ‘Her father came home drunk one Friday night after supping most of his wages away, lay down in a stupor on the rug and pegged out. Her mother went off with a man who couldn’t stomach children, and Clara and her young sister lived with a so-called decent woman who took them in because she could work them to death filling matchboxes. She kept them in a room no bigger than the outside privy and when the young one died she …’

‘Come away, Mr Page. Come down to the fire.’ Annie took him by the arm. ‘She’s out of it all now. She’s finished with her pain. Look how peaceful she is.’

He stumbled behind Annie down the steep narrow stairway. ‘That’s why she couldn’t see the bright side of things. Because there’d never been a bright bloody side for her to see!’

It was the first time Annie had heard the gardener swear. She hoped it did him good. Anger was better any old day than the numbing misery that had clouded Clara’s thinking, day in and day out.

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, Mr Page,’ she said.

‘The house that woman lived in was no bigger than a dog kennel! And the place Clara and her sister worked in …’ He spread his hands wide. ‘Room for a table for them to work at, but no room for chairs. They stood up all day long and well into the night, working with candles. Lily was half-blind, Annie, you guessed that?’

‘Here’s your tea. Drink it while it’s hot.’

‘She went as a doffer in a weaving shed when she got away from that woman. She was that small, that undernourished, she once told me she sweated cobs of fear when she walked between the looms, the space was that narrow …’

‘Have a little sip, Mr Page.’

‘Is it any wonder she never laughed? The laughter had been all kicked out of her a long time ago. An’ what good was I to her, going out of the cottage before she got up, coming back most nights when she was ready for bed? Too tired to be much company to her, eating the food she set before me on the table, but never thinking to tell her how much I enjoyed it. Taking her for granted all the time, letting her wait on me hand and foot even when she wasn’t fit …’

His hand trembled so much that Annie took the cup away from him. When he began to weep with harsh dry sobs, she left him alone with his grief.

On the day of Clara’s funeral the rain held off until the late afternoon. Dressed in Clara’s grey serge dress and jacket, hastily trimmed with bands of black crêpe, Annie walked by Adam’s side behind the cart carrying the wooden box to the churchyard. She kept her fingers lightly on his arm in case he stumbled in the deeply rutted lane, but he gave no sign that he even knew she was there.

As they stood together by the open grave, a carriage drew up, its horse brasses jingling and sparkling in a sudden spell of sunlight. Annie watched from beneath lowered eyelashes as Mrs Gray and her two step daughters walked across the grass, closely followed by a pot-bellied man wearing a greatcoat patterned in grey and black checks.

When Annie looked up and caught his eye the wink he gave her almost sent her toppling into the open grave, so from then on she kept her glance firmly fixed on Clara’s
old
boots padded at the toes to make them a more or less reasonable fit.

What a peculiar family they were! One quick glance had convinced Annie that Clara had been right about the girls. They looked like men dressed up as women, the frills and flounces and ruched ribbons on their hats only adding to the impression. It looked as if the Mediterranean sun had got at their noses too.

Annie felt shame wash over her at thinking such thoughts at a time like this, and especially at the way her mind wouldn’t settle on more serious things. Why was that? It wasn’t because she hadn’t liked Clara Page, because she had. She’d even managed to make her laugh once or twice and that was no mean feat.

Maybe it was because today was the day when, all things being equal, she would have been standing at the door of her father’s house looking down the street for the sight of Laurie turning the corner, keeping his promise to come for her on her birthday. To honour the vows they’d made in the sight of God. Her lip curled. How young she’d been then. How trusting and ready to believe in people. She even believed in God at that time.

‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.’

Annie risked a quick glance upwards and thought that the minister looked as if he was on the wrong side of his breakfast.

‘Seems like Adam’s let on his feet. That’s a bonny lass he’s got for himself.’

Margot Gray sat bolt upright in the carriage for the short ride back home, trying not to look at the girls slumped across from her, frilled as brothel-keepers, and talking, she guessed, about pig-swill or horse manure.

‘You’re wrong, Harry.’ She turned to look through the window. ‘That bonny lass isn’t for anybody but herself.’