The Travelling Man (17 page)

Unfastening her cloak, Annie looked down on the baby’s red twitching face. Weak blue eyes met her own and the plaintive wail changed to a hiccoughing sob. Pinkly swollen eyelids fluttered vainly, then were still. With the suddenness of a stone dropping down a well, the baby had fallen fast asleep.

‘The first chance I get I’m going to wash you all over,’ Annie whispered, ‘because you smell terrible.’

Day after day it rained till the last of the snow and ice were gone. The farm ditches overflowed, and the farmyard was a lake of mud.

When Barney Eccles knocked on Annie’s bedroom door each morning, she struggled up through dense layers of sleep, sure she had been in bed for no longer than a few minutes. She soon stopped caring what she looked like, piling layers of clothes on top of each other, wrapping her woollen scarf round her head before crossing it at the front and pinning it at the back.

Spring might well be in the air, but Annie took no notice of it. A long time ago, when her mother was alive, she had gone regularly to Sunday School, to be told by Edith Morris that the Lord Jesus was everywhere. That if you closed your eyes and sat quite still you would feel His presence holding you still.

One dark streaming morning as she swilled out the cowshed, Annie thought about that. Her hands were stuck with cold on the handle of the almost bald long brush. For one thing there wasn’t any time for sitting still and closing your eyes, but even if there had been, Annie felt sure Jesus had never visited this terrible desolate place set in the side of a hill. Up here there was nothing but hard faces and cold hard words, and that terrible loud laugh when Mr Eccles decided something was funny. Hatred exploded between him and his wife whenever they came within shouting distance of one
another
, but he never lifted a hand to her. Just turned on his heel and let out a great bellowing roar, as if he was relishing a sick and personal joke. As if he knew something nobody else did.

The children, too, were strangely unlovable. Sticky, sly and devious, they would grab food from the table, wolf it down without chewing, swallowing it whole as far as Annie could judge. Like dogs. They stared at her with flat pale eyes, scratching their barley-pale heads, picking at sores on their chins.

The smaller ones shivered with fear rather than cold when she stripped off their clothes to stand them in a dolly-tub when she couldn’t find a bath anywhere. She sat the older ones on the wooden draining board and told them to wash themselves all over, but they left black tidemarks round their necks and green ropes of slime descending from their nostrils. They dribbled down their chins. They were in a state of constant wetness.

‘I don’t know why you bother,’ their mother said, staring into the fire, her eyes blank. ‘They get enough colds as it is. Every one of them had the convulsions when they were teething. The boys worse than the girls. That one under the table was blue and stiff for an hour. Too much water on the body saps the strength. Anyroad, you’ve no sooner got them clean than they’re mucky again.’

‘I can’t get them to respond to me at all,’ Annie worried.

‘I don’t think they like you,’ Lily said, taking a hairpin from her slipping bun and rotating it round and round in her right ear. ‘They never take a liking to anybody. I know they don’t like
me
.’ She picked a small scab on the side of her nose. ‘Our Toby liked me, but he’s best off where he is with nobody taking to anybody round here.’

Benjamin appeared to like Annie. He clung to her like a leech, so that she became adept at carrying him around on her hip. She propped him up in a wooden box as she worked, talking to him, and sometimes a semblance of
a
chuckle would startle her so much she would have to stop what she was doing to rush over to him and cover his pale little face with kisses.

Yes, spring might well have been in the air, but there wasn’t time for Annie to be bothered with it. Yet one bright day a bedraggled goose laid an egg, and on her way out to the far field she saw rabbits huddled in the hedges, flushed out of their burrows by the never-ending rain.

Every day she told herself that she would have to get away. To where, she didn’t know, but to stay here was becoming impossible.

One morning, after finishing her work in the cowshed, she came out into the yard and sensed rather than saw the deep blackness of the night changing imperceptibly into the soft grey light of early dawn. She wished she could walk away down the hill without even turning round, so that never again would she have to hear Barney Eccles’s raucous inhuman laughter, or listen to his wife moaning her lot or screaming in demented frustration.

They needed her, and yet she knew that if she went away they would forget her in less than a week. Within a few days the big farm kitchen would be as cluttered as on the day she came, the children as filthy, their clothes and bodies unwashed from one week to the next. They would walk about bare-bottomed and bare-footed, mauve with cold. And they would somehow survive. But what would happen to Benjie if she left?

It was for Benjie’s sake that she stayed through a blustery March and an April when daffodils and cowslips covered the long slope down to the stream as the land slowly dried out. Barney Eccles set two men on to help him with the planting, one a fourteen year old boy with vacant eyes, and the other a burly Irishman with tangled eyebrows meeting over the bridge of a plum-red nose.

‘Yon’s young Annie Clancy,’ he told Barney one day. ‘I’d know that red hair anywhere. Her father’s married to a far distant cousin of mine.’ He wrinkled his high forehead so that the eyebrows mingled. ‘The lass got
into
trouble with a sailor and they chucked her out.’ His rheumy eyes watered. ‘But if she’s expecting then it’s a mystery where she’s hiding it.’

Annie had shed the thick cloak and the long woollen scarf. That day she was wearing her hair tied back from her face, but already the fresh wind had teased curling tendrils on to cheeks as rosy as flowering poppies.

Barney stared hard at her. ‘T’were a false alarm,’ he said, then as if that was unbearably comical, threw back his head laughing uproariously. ‘A sailor!’ he managed to gasp between great gulfs of laughter. ‘Young Annie and a bloody sailor – if that doesn’t take the biscuit! She acts that pure she’d make even the Virgin Mary seem like a wrong’un.’

From that day on Barney’s attitude to Annie changed completely. He observed her slyly. He came into the kitchen at times, ignoring the children but staring at her. One day he watched her boil peas before draining them into a basin and covering them with a crust. Another day he brought her a rabbit and showed her how to skin it, running his finger along the pink exposed flesh, looking at her with his mouth slightly open and the tip of his tongue showing. He pointed out a weasel running across the field with a robin in its mouth. When she cried out, he slapped his thigh and roared with glee.

The warmer weather came in May and for a few days Annie worked outside without her shawl. Barney told her that if she washed herself all over with the morning dew it would improve her looks. He muttered something else she didn’t catch and then he laughed – the everlasting mindless laughter.

Annie knew he was only biding his time, so she shot the bolt of her bedroom door at nights and tried not to be alone with him more than she could help.

But for Benjie she would have left the farm. He was far from well. Annie had seen her brothers with summer colds and coughs which never seemed to clear up, but Benjie was different. When a coughing spell was on him
he
flayed his little arms about, as if he would pluck his breath from the air. She lay awake at night listening to him snuffling, knowing he was going to sick up a thin frothy liquid that was sometimes streaked with blood.

‘He needs a doctor,’ she told Lily Eccles.

‘An’ I need some money. An’ I need to lie down. An’ I need another drink of tea.’

Annie thrust Benjie at her. ‘I’ve got to get the cans on the cart yet.’ Gently she touched the baby’s lilac-tinged lips. ‘Keep him warm till I get back.’

‘Benjie’s ill,’ she told Barney. ‘You should have the doctor to him. He’s not hardy like the others. He’s different. He needs more care.’

Slowly Barney finished tying the cans into position, taking his time. When he turned round he was grinning all over his big flat face. ‘There’s always a runt in every pack,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know that? It’s nature’s way.’

As soon as she could Annie ran back into the kitchen. Lily was sitting there, staring over the baby’s head into the fire, rocking herself backwards and forwards, patting Benjie’s back.

‘He’s gone off to sleep,’ she said. ‘Best take him upstairs.’ She held him out to Annie.

‘What’s happened to him?’ With a despairing cry Annie looked down at the pinched face, the blue-veined eyelids. ‘He wasn’t like this early on. What’s wrong?’ She knelt down by the fire. She loosened the ties of Benjie’s nightshirt, patted the still face. Refusing to acknowledge what she knew to be true. ‘He should have been seen by a doctor! I told you he had a bad cold.’ Fear caught at her throat. ‘He should have been kept down here by the fire. Wake up, Benjie! Wake up, little love!’

‘He’s gone,’ Lily said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘He’s never been strong. He’d never have walked, so we must think on it as a blessing.’

Annie couldn’t take her eyes from the baby’s face. It was a pot face, reminding her of a doll she’d seen on an
Easter
fairground long ago. His hands were pot hands, strangely heavy when she lifted them up. Hysteria was a lump in her throat; terror pricked at her armpits.

‘Fetch his box,’ Lily said, in that same flat tone. ‘Barney will see to him. No good delaying it. Best get it over and done with.’ She took the dead baby from Annie’s arms. ‘The box. Go and fetch the box.’

Annie couldn’t believe it. What in God’s name had happened to this woman to make her as she was? There was more feeling in a hard grey moorland stone.

‘He was your
baby
! You gave him birth! Don’t you
care
that he’s dead?’ Annie was beside herself. ‘He wanted loving, that was all. That’s all your children want. Nobody’s ever loved them, so they don’t know how to love back. But Benjie was different … He would have grown up different from the others. He was special, and you didn’t want to know!’ She got to her feet. ‘
I
loved him even if nobody else did.’

‘’Spect you put him in the place of the one you lost.’

The words were said quietly, but Lily’s expression was sniggering and sly.

‘You know what they say about sailors. Here one day and gone the next, not caring a toss where they hang their caps.’

Annie backed away, a hand to her mouth. How did she know such things? How could she say them in that soft voice with her lips half smiling, while holding her own dead baby in her arms?

‘Go and fetch him,’ Lily was saying now. ‘He’ll have to bury Benjie right away, before the others come down.’ She raised her voice. ‘An’ there’ll be no blabbing about this to nobody. See? We don’t need no doctor, nor any busybodies coming up the hill asking their questions. Funerals cost money an’ we haven’t got none.’

Stumbling across the yard and into the cowshed, tears running down her face, Annie was already making plans to get away. To where it didn’t matter, just as long as it was far enough away from this God-forsaken, desolate
place
, where no one laughed except to mock, and where a baby could die without its mother shedding a tear.

Ten minutes later, standing at the window of her room, she saw Barney Eccles walking out across the field with the box held carelessly underneath an arm. He carried a spade over his shoulder, and by the swagger in his walk she felt sure he was whistling. Annie knuckled her fists against her mouth to prevent herself from screaming.

She worked inside the house all that morning, but early in the afternoon when she went outside to empty a bucket she saw Barney Eccles standing by the pump watching a man on a horse riding down the long hillslope. There was something familiar about the rider in the slouch hat crouched low in the saddle. Annie dropped her bucket with a clatter and ran across the cobbled yard.

‘Mr Eccles?’

‘Aye?’

‘Who was that?’She pointed down the hill. ‘The man on the horse. Who was it?’

The familiar mirthless smile widened the slack mouth. ‘But you know who it was, Annie. You know full well exactly who it was.’ To her horror he caught her by the wrists. ‘The high and mighty Armstrong, that’s who it was. Trying to tell me I ought to be sending for the knacker man instead of doing his job properly and getting my best cow back on its feet.’ The shifty eyes narrowed. ‘I’m having no knacker man nor no inspector up here asking questions, poking their noses in where they’re not wanted.’

He turned his head to spit over his shoulder, and as he did so Annie tried to break away, but he held firm. She forced herself to meet his eyes.

‘Did Mr Armstrong ask after me?’

Barney’s bellow of laughter was a nauseating view of brown uneven teeth, and the rancid smell of foul breath. ‘Ask after
you
? Now, why should he ask after the likes of Annie Clancy?’

‘Because I was living in his house not all that long ago!’ Annie was almost dancing with frustration. ‘Because he knows I’m here, that’s why, an’ even if he didn’t want to see me I know he wouldn’t ride away without enquiring after me.’

Barney shouted aloud with glee. ‘So you thought he would be enquiring after you, then? Well, he never said a word about you. He couldn’t wait to get away after the mouthful I gave him.’

‘But he
must
have mentioned me!’ Annie twisted round to stare frantically down the long hill. ‘Just to ask how I was? Just to say he hoped I was all right?’

Her distress had flushed her cheeks, brightened her eyes. Barney felt the ache of wanting her tightening his loins.

‘No need to moither yourself about him, nor over that sailor fella.’ With a sudden jerk he pinned Annie’s arms behind her back and lifted her into the shadow of the house, well away from the windows. ‘I know you think I’m a hard man with what I had to do for our Benjie, but what man wouldn’t grow a skin as thick as a bleedin’ rhinoceros having to live with that apology for a woman back yon?’ He ground himself against her. ‘Do you think I enjoyed what I had to do?’