The Travelling Man (2 page)

Since growing older, Annie had begun to believe that Edith was a bit of a trial to her mother, though she understood how difficult it would be for the old lady to be even faintly nasty to the daughter who kept her so clean. Spotless, in fact.

‘I expect you heard me shouting after me dad?’ Annie stood at the foot of the bed. ‘You can’t have missed it with both our doors being open. I gave him a right tickin’ off.’

Grandma Morris nodded towards the fire. ‘Put another of them big cobs on, love. It’s not time for Nextdoor to come in for a bit yet and there’s a real nip in the air today. No, don’t shut the door, love. The winter’ll be here soon enough, God knows.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘Well of course I heard you bawling your head off. I’m not
that
deaf. I reckon if they’d been handing out the medals for who could shout the loudest in this street, you’d win hands down. Mrs Greenhalgh down the bottom end would have to split her tonsils before she could yell as loud as that.’

She knew that young Annie would rather die than tell about the clout she’d had, but the left side of her face was as crimson as a port wine stain, and tears still glistened on her eyelashes. If Grandma Morris had spoken aloud
what
she was thinking about Jack Clancy, the very air around her would have turned blue. The man was a boor and a bully but, to be fair to him, he was doing his best to fetch up six kids on his own since his wife died, so maybe there was some good in him. Though you’d need a search warrant to find it – you would ’n’ all.

‘Me dad wants us to have a lodger.’ Indignation flared Annie’s nostrils. ‘A bloomin’
lodger
who hasn’t even got a job. A sailor!’ She clasped work-roughened hands round the brass knob at the foot of the bed. ‘I know me mother would have been put to shame to hear me behaving like that, but she’s dead and gone, and there’s only me. If I don’t stand up for meself I’m a gonner. Me dad would treat me like a doormat if I let him. An’ I know I shouldn’t be talking about him,
calling
him like this, but you don’t know how selfish he is, Grandma Morris.’

The tears, held tight inside her, suddenly overflowed. ‘He still has the front bedroom all to himself, not caring a toss that three of the boys have to squash in a bed in the back, with the other two lying on a mattress on the floor. It’s a wonder me mother doesn’t come back and haunt him. You know how kind to everybody
she
was.’ A great sob burst from Annie’s throat. ‘I cry for her more now than when she’d just died.
You
liked her, I know.’

‘I’d have laid her out when she passed on if I could have got to your house, love. That’s how much I thought about her. They don’t grow them like your mother all that often.’

Annie twisted away from the bed. ‘I know it’s a wicked thing to say, but
why
did she marry him, Grandma Morris? They’d nothing in common. Nothing!’

‘He married
her
,’ the old lady said, nodding her head mysteriously. ‘Don’t go making a big drama out of something you know nothing about. An’ don’t go working yourself up into a lather about your father, or giving him cheek at the top of your voice. Things’ll only go from bad to worse if you carry on like that.’

It was no use. Annie had come to have her say, so there was no stopping her now. Who else
could
she talk to? Who else would listen? The shame of being hit made her cringe inside; each time it happened it left her feeling more diminished – yes, that was the word –
diminished
.

‘My father doesn’t like me! I stopped trying to make him
love
me a long time ago, but it’s come to me lately that he doesn’t even
like
me. He looks at me sometimes with such a terrible expression on his face. I’m not imagining it. There’s murder in his eyes some days.’ She gave a sob. ‘An’ it’s me birthday today, Grandma Morris. I’m seventeen today. It’s me birthday, and nobody knows!’

Not for nothing was Grandma Morris known as ‘the peacemaker’. So many confidences had been poured out to her from the foot of her bed she could have set every single family in the street at each other’s throats if she’d been inclined to gossip. So, at the risk of sometimes verging on the side of hypocrisy, she would listen, swallow what she was really thinking, and soothe, smooth over wounded feelings, dispense wisdom from the bed set under the window in the front room of the small terraced house.

She looked long and hard at Annie and told herself, not for the first time, that but for the clothes she was wearing Mary Clancy’s young lass could be taken for a lad. Not a vestige of hair showed beneath the floppy flat cap; the sleeves of the cotton blouse were pushed up to reveal Annie’s thin arms, ending in hands as red as if they’d been boiled in a bag. The small circular shawl she was wearing round her shoulders was crossed at the front and knotted at the back. Grandma Morris sighed. Annie didn’t take after her mother for looks, nowt was more certain. Mary Clancy had had hair as black as the soot from the chimney-back, and skin like the cream skimmed from the top of the milk. Annie’s mother, before she wasted away to nothing, had been a raving beauty, a woman to make men lust after her. No wonder her husband had seen to it that every year
since
he married her she was either expecting, nursing or burying a child.

‘When I was your age,’ she said carefully, ‘I remember thinking that anyone who tried to tell me what to do hated me. I was growing up, love, just like you’re growing up. I thought I knew best, better than anybody. How dare they try to tell me how I should think, or how to behave myself!’

There was a question in Annie’s eyes, but it would never be asked. ‘Did your father hit you?’ it said. ‘If you dared to speak your mind, did he lay about you?’

Nextdoor coming in at that very moment was a bit of a blessing, Grandma Morris thought. Annie almost knocked her over in her dash for the door.

‘That lass’s father was bog-Irish, and it’s coming out in her,’ Nextdoor said, rolling the blankets down to give the bed a bit of an airing while her neighbour was on the commode. ‘Mary Clancy thought herself a cut above, just because she served her time to millinery and dressmaking.’

Grandma Morris said a diplomatic nothing. It never mattered whether you answered Nextdoor or not. She was always far too busy listening to herself, in any case.

‘Did you know they’ve got bugs across the street? I’ve seen two men going in this morning with elastic bands round their trouser bottoms to stop the flecks crawling up their legs.’ Nextdoor was giving the flock mattress a good pawing to even out the lumps. ‘One thing about young Annie. She does her best to keep the place clean. Did you hear her creating merry ’ell a bit since? Her mother’ll be turning in her grave if she was listening.’

‘I’ve finished, thank you,’ Grandma Morris said. In a voice as quietly dignified as circumstances would allow.

When Annie got back home she was joined almost immediately by a small boy with the build of a stunted gnome.

‘Where’s me tea, our Annie?’ Snatching off his cap he skimmed it onto the table. ‘Me back’s sticking to me front I’m that clemmed.’

Annie rounded on him, her anger far from spent. ‘How many times have I to tell you, our Georgie, not to put your mucky cap on my clean table?’ She jerked her head. ‘Out in the back with it, then get your head underneath the tap before the boys come in from school. You’re all sitting down together for once, and if our dad misses his tea then it’s his own look-out!’

Not all that long ago Annie had been able to talk to her younger brother. She’d been able to confide in him, unburden herself to him. A month ago he would often get the coal in for her, side the table, chivvy the other boys to bed, crack a joke with her, but now he was a miner he was above behaving like a sissie. Already Annie could see him turning into a replica of all the other pitmen she knew who treated their women with a superior contempt. Annie had seen the same happen to a lot of lads once they followed their fathers down the mine. She had noticed that the relationship between them changed from that very first time they stood together in the pit cage, to drop far, far below the ground. From that day on they were brothers, not father and son.

‘Where’s me dad gone to?’

Georgie had no intention of doing what he was told, and Annie knew it. He was staring at her with eyes set in a face as black as pitch, showing her who was boss.

‘I don’t know where he’s gone. Your dad never tells anybody where he’s goin’, an’ you know it.’ She moved to the fire to stir a brown stew glistening with globules of fat, then took the poker and moved the trivet away from the glowing coals. ‘I suppose if I ask you about this lodger he’s wanting to bring here, you’ll say you know nothing about it?’

Straightening up, she saw her brother slowly backing away. ‘Oh, our Georgie, why don’t you stick up for me like you used to? Just this once?’

Opening a drawer set in the side of the big square table she scattered spoons in a heap before setting them out: ‘Billy, Timmy, Eddie, John, Georgie, our Dad, and me, if there’s time to sit down.’

She dropped onto a stool as a stab of pain shot through her ear. Closed her eyes and pressed her lips tightly together.

When she opened her eyes again Georgie had gone out, and standing in his place was a man she had never seen before.

THE SEPTEMBER SUN
was as weak as blue milk, but even so, coming out of it into the gloom of the small front room, Laurie Yates thought the bowed figure was a boy. But when Annie straightened up he saw her blouse straining across her chest and guessed it was Jack Clancy’s daughter. He held out his hand.

‘Miss Clancy?’

Her hair was bundled up into a man’s cap; she had the pointed features of a half-starved child, but her eyes wore the bleak expression of a disillusioned woman. A piece of sacking round her waist formed an apron of sorts, and her feet were stuck into miner’s boots. She would be, he reckoned, about fourteen years old. If that.

‘Miss Clancy?’ Was she deaf, dim-witted? Or both?

Annie felt her mouth drop open and forget to shut itself. Nobody had ever called her Miss Clancy before. Not even the priest, and he knew his manners if anybody did. The shock of it brought her to her feet. The pleasure of it made her blush. Wiping her hand first on her long skirt, she shook hands with the stranger, too flabbergasted to think of the right thing to say.

‘Your father said I would find you here.’

Annie couldn’t hide her astonishment. So this was the lodger who was looking for a place to stay and a job down the mine? This man had an ease and grace about him, with a voice that held the lilt of music. To her way of thinking all sailors had rough red faces half hidden behind bushy beards, but this man was clean-shaven with a head of close black curls. His skin was different too, swarthy, not grey like her father’s when the pit dirt was washed from it. He was out of place; he didn’t belong. As out of place as a flower on a muck midden.

‘I’m Laurie Yates,’ he was saying. ‘I told your father I would look around for a bed, but he insisted I come here.’

Annie was getting her breath back now. For a minute or two she’d been in danger of letting herself be taken in by a soft voice and a wheedling smile. But this Laurie Yates was only another man, with an appetite to satisfy and dirty clothes to wash. She wasn’t going to let him soft-soap
her
, even if he had got round her father over a tankard of ale.

Deliberately she turned her back on him to get seven plates down from the range.

‘You can’t stop here, Mr Yates, there’s not the room.’ She set the plates round the table. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Not even room for a little ’un.’ She turned round suddenly, long skirt swinging out. ‘You can see how it is without me having to spell it out for you.’

Laurie Yates could see how it was all right. When the fresh colour had drained from this young girl’s face, he had seen the clear imprints of fingers on her left cheek. Oh, no indeed, there was no room for an extra one in this small room dominated by the big table and the black fireplace with its lofty mantelpiece. He smiled on her.

‘I’ll be on my way then, Miss Clancy. I’m sorry to have bothered you. A man only needs half an eye to see that one extra would be an intolerable burden on your hospitality.’

‘Sit down!’

Annie pointed to her father’s rocking-chair. ‘I’d be a disgrace to me mother if I didn’t offer you a sup of
something
or a bite to eat.’ She studied him, hands on hips. ‘She never sent a stranger away from the door without giving him a crust, even if it was the last in the house. So for me mother’s sake, Laurie Yates, sit yourself down.’

She added a good handful of oatmeal to the stew simmering in the big black pan, bending over showing the rounded shape of her buttocks, totally without self-consciousness, like a child, not caring how she looked or what she revealed.

Laurie was intrigued. She wasn’t a child, and yet she was entirely without feminine guile, if that was the word he was thinking of.

She straightened up and pointed the wooden spoon at him. ‘Have you ever been down a mine, Mr Yates?’

The smell coming from the pan was bringing the saliva to Laurie’s mouth. He had walked from Blackburn, and apart from a hunk of bread and a drink of water, his stomach had remained empty all day. He was so hungry he could have snatched the spoon from her and helped himself to the thick bubbling stew, stiff with potatoes, laced with onions and nutty with oatmeal.

Yesterday a woman tending her herb garden had invited him into her cottage and heaped a plate with potato cakes fresh from the griddle, spreading them with butter that ran down his chin as he ate. She had told him he reminded her of her dead son, but Laurie had known she was lying. Her dead lover, more like it, he’d guessed, trying not to look too relieved when her husband had come in from the quarry covered with white dust, none too pleased that this black-haired stranger was sitting there calmly eating what should have been
his
tea.

‘Aye, there’s a job going at the quarry,’ he told Laurie. ‘There’s a man needed to wheel the rubbish away on a bogie to the tip. A
muck-chucker
,’ he added spitefully, licking his lips as Laurie chased the last dregs of runny butter with his finger. ‘Hard work, but then I suppose you’re used to that?’