The Travelling Man (16 page)

The inside of the Clancys’ house appalled her. The table didn’t look as if it was cleared between one meal and another. The ashpan was so filled with dead ashes it was pushed out into the hearth, and she was sure a bird could have nested in Florrie Clancy’s hair without anybody being any the wiser.

‘I’ve called to see if you can give me Annie’s address,’ she said straight out, looking at Jack Clancy who was sitting on a low stool by the fire with a last gripped between his knees, nailing a clog-iron back on to its wooden sole.

He shot Edith a look, a look of disgust and contempt, then went back to his hammering, banging away, ignoring her.

‘I’d like to write to her,’ Edith said, standing her ground, determined not to be intimidated by a mere man. ‘I’d like to know how she is, and I’d like to go and see her.’ She finished on a rush. ‘An’ if she’s not happy, bring her back.’

The staccato hammering stopped immediately. Jack lurched to his feet, clattering last, clog and hammer to the floor. To her horror Edith found him standing next to her, his face pushed into hers, his eyes on a leave with her own. He smelt of drink and sweat. His closeness was an affront to her fastidiousness. She could feel the heat and the violence emanating from him. She was sure he was going to strike her.

‘We don’t talk about Annie in this house. Not now, and not ever! There’s no address and there will never be no address, an’ if we ever got one it would go straight to the back of the fire!’

The spirit in Edith that would have taken her into the African jungle to confront far worse than this filthy slavering man squaring up to her, glaring at her with his bloodshot eyes, rose up in her.

‘Mark my words,’ she said, in a whisper that seemed to echo round the room. ‘I will find Annie. I will find her wherever she is, and if she’s not happy I’ll fetch her back to live with me.’ She spun round on her heel to fire a parting salvo. ‘She’s not had much luck with the men in her life, that innocent child.’ She flung the door open to step out into the night. ‘My mother used to say it was a man’s world, and by all that’s holy she was right! The only good man that’s ever lived was put to death. On a
cross
!’

‘She’s barmy, chuck. Not right in the head.’

Florrie’s hand on her husband’s arm was firm. She could feel his anger subsiding even as she led him to his chair. In the months she had been married to Jack Clancy she had come to know him very well. All shout and bluster, a man who asked for little else but his beer and his food, and a bit of the other two or three times a week. A father who never laid a finger on his sons, leaving their upbringing entirely to her. Not a man for inconvenient hobbies like most of his mates with their pigeons and their ferrets. Not the sort of man who went off at weekends walking the fells, fishing the streams, or climbing the hills, coming home whacked and good for nothing.

‘She should be locked away,’ she soothed. ‘Put away for the rest of her natural.’

‘She doesn’t know.’ Jack’s head was down, his hands hanging loosely between his knees. ‘How can she know … the potty old maid.’

‘The ugly sod,’ said Florrie, to make him feel better. ‘If she’d ever had a man she wouldn’t talk such rubbish. She’ll not find Annie. Your Annie will have let on her feet, you mark my words.’

Annie had never been so cold in her life. Huddled deep into the long black cloak she saw birds wheeling over sodden fields; she saw flowing ditches and the flooded gardens of stone-built cottages. When they came to a river the driver pointed out the height of the fast-flowing water.

‘Another foot and yon bridge wouldn’t take it. Yon’s more like a highland stream this year.’ He spat a trickle of brown saliva from the side of his mouth. ‘Some folks say they’ve seen the signs of an early spring but there’s nowt I’ve seen yet to back them up. I wouldn’t be surprised if it snows again. It’s cold enough for it.’

Annie was too miserable to care one way or the other. When she had told the driver where she was going, a strange expression had crossed his weather-beaten face.

‘Tha knows Barney Eccles then?’

‘No. Do you?’ Annie had asked him.

‘I knows
of
him,’ the carter had told her. ‘Aye, I knows of him all reet. Tha’re sure tha wants tekking there?’

Annie merely nodded. She was too unhappy to think straight. It had all happened too quickly. It was hard to believe she wouldn’t be going to bed that night in the room with the shining furniture. Hard to accept that she’d been wrong about the animal doctor all along. But all that was behind her now. She had left her room as clean and tidy as time had allowed. She’d rolled her mattress up and tied it into a sausage with string – as if she had died of the typhoid and the mattress was ready for burning.

She shuddered, and when the driver said he would have to set her down as his horse couldn’t climb the high road to the Eccles’s farm, she thanked him for his company.

‘Tha’s not said two words, lass,’ he muttered. He jerked his head at the hill still patched with snow. ‘Tha’re sure …?’

Annie nodded, stumbling away from the narrow road, on up the rocky uneven path, clutching her small bundle,
keeping
her head down against the freezing wind. When the man appeared suddenly from the fringe of gaunt bare trees she was too terrified even to cry out.

Barney Eccles almost dragged Annie the rest of the way up the hill. Then at the house he gave her a push that almost sent her sprawling.

‘Lily? Where the ’eck are you, woman? You’ll never believe it when I tell you what I’ve found!’ A hand as large and red as a knuckle-end of ham gripped Annie’s shoulder. ‘She says Mrs Martindale sent her. Your cousin Nellie. That sourpuss who came to our wedding and give us a pair of bloody sugar tongs for a present.’ He snorted like an outraged bull. ‘Nay, surely if I can remember her, you can! Once seen never forgotten, I’d say, with a phizog like that!’

‘Oh,
her
.’

Lily Eccles, a bare-bottomed child clinging to her skirts, a baby balanced on her hip, slapped yet another child away. Leaning perilously close to the open fire, she stirred something in a large black pan.

‘What’s she want?’ She turned to stare at Annie. ‘Our Nellie’s husband did himself a favour when he got shot through the head.’ She kicked a scrawny cat out of the way. ‘Never did owt for nothing our Nellie didn’t.’

Annie, still staggering from the blast of heat, wrinkling her nose from the stench, stared round the large living-kitchen in dismay.

Seven children, the eldest no more than ten years old, sat, crawled or lolled white-faced against the walls. Seven heads of thick white-blond hair turned uninterested stares in her direction. Every single surface of the big room was covered with piles of clothes, unwashed pans, odd boots, clogs, stacks of old newspapers, the handlebars of a bicycle and an assortment of unwashed crockery, whilst underneath the table a cat lay in a dirty cardboard box, nuzzled by four tiny kittens, each one anchored firmly to an overflowing nipple.

‘She wants to know if there’s a chance you might be needing some help?’ Barney’s ruddy complexion deepened to purple. He slapped a leg with the flat of his hand. ‘She says your Nellie thought we might take her on.’ His laugh was so loud that three of the children began to cry.

‘How much does she want?’

For the first time the woman straightened up from the fire, put the bare-bottomed baby down on the filthy flagged floor, and looked directly at Annie.

‘The last girl wanted two shillings a week and all found, but we can’t afford nothing like that. We’re not moneyed people.’

Annie tried to hide the note of desperation in her voice. It was already going dark outside, and it would take her at least an hour to slide and slither her way back down the hill-slope. Lily Eccles was a woman near to breakdown; you didn’t have to be a doctor to see that. She was so dirty, so slovenly, that compared to her, Annie decided, the woman her father had married looked like she’d just been pressed with a flat iron. The hardness of Lily’s thin body was reflected in her expression. She was daring Annie to say she would stay, but so deep into hopelessness that to ask her would be impossible.

‘I’ll stay for one shilling and sixpence a week. And all found,’ Annie said clearly. ‘With nothing binding on either side.’

Lily looked at her husband. ‘Does she know how to look after children?’ She hoisted the baby back on to her hip, and Annie noticed that one of his feet was not only clubbed but turned completely inwards, at right-angles to a stick-thin leg.

‘I’ll leave all that to you, Lil.’ Barney clattered his way to the door. ‘You set her on if you want. I’ve got the milking to do. The yard might have been mud yesterday, but now it’s frozen like a skating rink.’

Annie nodded. ‘I can look after children. I was bringing five brothers up before I left home.’

‘She’s not well.’ Lily Eccles pointed her stirring spoon at a small girl with a hand up her dress, scratching herself feverishly. ‘Her skin’s flaking off. Are you good at getting up?’

‘My father’s a miner, on the early shift, so I’m used to being up at five.’

‘Well, that’s an hour
later
than what you’ll be getting up here.’ Lily seemed determined to scare Annie off. ‘You’ll have to weigh the milk, then lift the cans on to the cart to have them down on the bottom road in time for the pick-up. Then there’s the scouring-out to be got through long before the second milking.’ She jiggled the baby up and down as it began a thin plaintive wail. ‘Then there’s the breakfast to be got and the three big ones to get set on the walk to school. They’re off at the moment with their chests.’ She stuck a finger in an open tin of condensed milk on the table and gave it to the baby to suck. ‘And there’s the washing, though where to get it dry’s the big problem this weather …’

‘You’ve just the one fire?’

‘Not even that when the coal runs out.’ She jerked her head at the door ‘He tells me he’ll see to things, then he forgets. Slap-’appy, that’s ’is problem.’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Things have got a bit cluttered and messy in the bedrooms, but a bit of tidying will soon put that right. Down here I can keep more of an eye on everything.’

Annie was too cold to see the irony in this. She held out her arms to the baby. ‘I’ll give you a hand with getting the children to bed. Starting with this one.’

‘You don’t look much more than a child yourself.’ Lily was staring directly at Annie, her head to one side. ‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Annie. Annie Clancy.’

‘Catholic?’

‘Nothing,’ Annie said firmly.

‘You’re not in any trouble?’

‘No trouble.’

‘No baby on the way?’

‘Definitely no baby. No baby coming, no trouble of any kind.’

‘No mother?’

‘No. An’ no father either. Leastways the one I have doesn’t like me. Hates me is nearer the truth.’

‘Mr Eccles doesn’t like our children.’ Lily nodded in understanding. ‘He ignores them as much as he can. They don’t like him neither.’

There wasn’t a hint of black humour in the statement. No suspicion of a dry twinkle in Lily’s hard eyes. Annie guessed that any sweetness lingering in her soul must have been driven out of it a long, long time ago. She felt sure that the exhausted grim-faced woman wouldn’t have recognised a joke if it had been told to her by a clown wearing a big red nose.

Annie followed her new employer out of the kitchen, down an unmopped flag floor, up a flight of stairs with tattered remnants of an old carpet, as though someone in a frenzy had ripped the carpet from the treads and thrown it away.

‘Barney threw the stairs carpet through the landing window five years or so ago,’ Lily said. ‘His mother fell down from top to bottom and split her skull open. Caught her foot in a frayed piece of carpet. Not a speck of blood to be seen, but she was dead all right. Barney buried her at the bottom end of the garden, near where the children have their swing. We never said nowt to anybody. There’s three babies out there as well.’ Lily opened a door on the right. ‘Barney doesn’t bother with undertakers. Or doctors. He delivers all the babies himself. And buries them, if needs be.’

The smell in the bedroom was overpowering. The bed was covered by a heap of dark-grey blankets. A rickety chest-of-drawers, its surface dotted with candle-grease, stood underneath a window so thick with dirt that it would be hard to tell night from day. The contrast to the room Annie had just left behind her was so
great
she almost turned and ran. Then asked herself, where to?

‘I’ll leave you to settle in.’ Lily held out her arms for the baby. ‘Unless you’d like him in here with you?’ She nodded in a satisfied manner when the baby wound his arms round Annie’s neck and nuzzled his head into her, making little whimpering sounds. ‘I’ll fetch his cot in, then. He’s taken to you. He keeps the two he’s in with awake half the night with his crying. He’s never stopped whingeing and moaning since the day he was born.’

When the cot came Annie tucked the frayed blankets round the baby’s neck. The cradle-cap darkening the rounded forehead made her want to take an oiled flannel to it, gently easing it away, the way she’d seen her mother do when John had been born with the same thing.

‘What’s he called?’

‘Benjamin. That means last son. An’ that’s what he’s going to be.’ Lily’s voice was as hard as flint. ‘There’ll be no more babies.’ She stood with one hand on the door handle. ‘Eleven in twelve years, and him not taking to a single one of them. He even sent our Toby away when he saw the lad was turning out to be tuppence short. Only tuppence, mind you – there was a lot of good in that lad.’ She made a spitting motion from the side of her mouth. ‘Men! The only good ’uns are the dead ’uns. I wouldn’t give you a tuppenny bun for the lot of ’em!’

‘Me neither,’ Annie said, bringing what could have been taken for a smile to Lily’s thin lips.

Annie stared at the closed door. Was Mrs Eccles making all that up? She walked over to the window, rubbing a small section of the pane clean. Down at the bottom of the garden, she’d said, by the swing. Three babies and one grandma –
buried
there? Peering intently, she made out the outline of a swing: Oh, dear God, how Biddy would have relished a tale like that. A split skull and no blood? Had Mr Eccles given his mother a push? Biddy would have convinced herself he had. She winced as the sounds of his loud laugh spiralled up to her from
the
yard. Was he talking to himself? Laughing at himself? Did he really dislike every one of his children?