The Travelling Man (26 page)

Annie put a hand to her throat. Margot Gray? Mrs Gray from the big house, downstairs in the living-room, with the place looking like a pig-sty. No cloth on the table and the best chair covered in paper patterns! Dropping in uninvited! Oh, dear God! And here she was, half dressed, the front of the bodice pinned and the hem only partly tacked up. Bits of cotton on the floor. No cake in the tin … So flustered she could hardly speak, Annie called out that she was coming and ran downstairs.

At the sight of her Kit Dailey put up a hand and sleeked back his already smooth hair. So this was Adam’s housekeeper. No wonder the old codger was keeping her to himself. No wonder he kept his mouth shut when they
asked
about her. Compared to the ailing wife this girl was all colour, glowing vivid colour. Compared to Clara Page, this one was the ruddy Fairy Queen!

‘You may go now, Dailey.’ Margot nodded a dismissal. She smiled at Annie. ‘May I sit down, dear?’

Kit Dailey left them to it, remembering first to touch his forehead in a way that made the gesture look like an insult. ‘You may go now, Dailey. Wait outside.’ Something inside him cringed every time he was spoken to in that way. Why did the possession of money give anyone the right to speak to another human being like that?

He climbed back into the trap and folded his arms. He couldn’t get over the sight of the gardener’s girl and the colour of her. That blue dress and that glorious red hair. He bet the shiny material had cost a bonny penny. How had a young lass persuaded a miser like Adam Page to fork out money like that? Happy as a pig in muck when he got his wages, but nobody had ever seen him spend a brass farthing of it. Kit’s lip curled. Talk about a dark horse. The sly old devil had definitely spruced himself up lately. No tobacco stains down the front of his waistcoat now, whereas not all that long ago you could have stood Adam Page side by side with the scarecrow in the bottom field and not told the difference.

Kit laughed out loud.

To cover her confusion, Annie was now talking nineteen to the dozen.

‘Mr Page gave me the money to buy a new dress, but I went on the market for a good look round and got two dress lengths and this second-hand machine for the same money.’

Margot made a small circle with her finger for Annie to turn round.

‘The bow at the back was a bit tricky.’ Annie tried to peer over her shoulder at it. ‘But it had to go on to hide the gathers. It’s the first time I’ve ever made a dress right from scratch, with new stuff and everything.’
She
smoothed down the pin-tucked bodice with obvious pride. ‘I had a terrible job with the button loops, they kept twisting all over the shop, the fiddly things.’

‘It’s simply lovely, Annie.’ Margot guessed that Annie was chattering away not from over-familiarity, but because she’d had no formal training, obviously not knowing any better. Annie had never been taught to be servile, therefore she could be herself. In her present mood, Margot found the situation much to her liking. She smiled. ‘You have a precious gift there in your fingers, Annie. I could almost believe you’ve served your time to dressmaking.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Gray.’ Annie remembered to give a little bob. ‘I must have got it from my mother. She could make a blouse from a duster, and her feather stitching was that fine you’d need a magnifying glass to see it.’

Margot smoothed down her skirt. She hadn’t enjoyed herself’so much in a long time. Her mother had once told her she came from peasant stock, so that could account for the fact that she felt completely at home in the tiny room with the rag rugs on the floor, and the furniture so crowded together there was hardly room to squeeze a body between the table and the overloaded dresser.

For another thing she was warm for the first time in weeks. The fireplace in the drawing-room up at the house was large enough to take an ox for roasting, but the room itself was as cold as a dank tomb. Her feet were perpetually numb, and although she knew she should wear heavier shoes, she wasn’t ready to give in to her age for a long time yet. It was bad enough having two enormous step-daughters clomping about in unspeakable footwear. She looked down at her pale green, high-buttoned shoes, turning an ankle this way and that to admire them. The day was a long way off when she would be inclined to put comfort before fashion.

‘May I?’ She unbuttoned her long duster coat.

Annie looked embarrassed enough to cry. ‘Take it off if you want to, Mrs Gray. I never thought you’d be stopping or I’d have asked you to do so before.’

Margot shook her head. ‘I won’t take it off, thank you, Annie. I really came to say how sad it is to see Adam going about his work without a dog at his heels. We gave him the dog as a puppy when one of our border-collies had an unfortunate meeting with a stray.’ She sighed. ‘Mr Armstrong said he’d hated putting the dog to sleep.’

Moving a piece of paper pattern from a chair, Annie sat down. ‘Mr Armstrong thinks more of animals than he does of human beings.’

Margot sat up straight. ‘You know Seth Armstrong?’

‘I should do. I lived at his house right through the cold snap.’

‘Do you mean you were working there?’

Annie knew her face had gone red. She wished she’d kept her mouth shut, but there was no going back on it now. Not with Mrs Gray’s eyes standing out from her head on stalks. ‘In a way I was, an’ yet in another way I wasn’t. It was all because he knocked me down – at least his horse knocked me down – on the top road on the edge of the moors. He took me back to his house till I got better.’

‘When was that, did you say?’

‘Early on in the year. When we had all that snow.’

‘So you saw him yesterday?’ Margot frowned. In that case why hadn’t Seth admitted that he knew the gardener’s girl? She sensed an intriguing mystery.

Annie’s chin was up. ‘No, I never saw him yesterday. I made sure I was away to town before he got here.’

‘You don’t like Mr Armstrong?’

‘It’s not for me to like or dislike him, Mrs Gray.’

‘You mean for the likes of me, don’t you, Annie? A remark like that doesn’t become you. Tell me why you’ve taken such a dislike to him. I wouldn’t have thought a man like that had an enemy in the world.’

Annie could hardly bear to look at the elegant woman sitting in Adam’s chair. Mrs Gray was playing a game. She was pretending they were two neighbours having a good old gossip by the fire. But they weren’t, were
they
? This woman with prune-coloured hair puffed up like a barmcake, circles of rouge on her cheeks and button-bright eyes was bored to death sitting around all day doing nothing. She was here to pass the time on, thinking she might learn something to have a good laugh about with her family that evening. Right then. Why not give her something interesting enough to pass on? Then they could all enjoy themselves.

‘To tell you why I don’t like Mr Armstrong, I would have to start at the beginning,’ she said, too loudly.

‘I’m listening, Annie.’

Annie stood up, feeling that what she had to say would come better from a standing position. In that moment she was once again Annie Clancy standing at the poss-tub day after day, wearing a man’s flat cap, her mother’s old blouse and over-large pit boots. She took a deep breath.

‘My father is a collier. When I lived at home he would come in reeking of pit muck and sweat. There’d be cockroaches in his clothes, and I used to shake them out and bang his trousers against the backyard wall to get the worst of the dirt out. He drank most of his wages away, so that there was never enough for food, and what there was my mother gave to me and my five brothers.’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘My father used to take his leather belt off and hit me with it. Just me. Never my brothers.’

Margot put out a hand. ‘Don’t go on if you don’t want to, Annie. I have no wish to pry,’ she said insincerely.

She was ignored. It was as though all the bad things in Annie’s life, all the remembered hurts, the suffering, rose up in her, not in sorrow but in anger. Not all that long ago it would have been in sorrow, but not now. Never again.

‘My mother died when I was twelve. Of malnutrition, the doctor said. Of years and years of reckoning on she had eaten, when all the time she was so hungry she could have gnawed the table leg. So when she took ill there was
nothing
there to give her strength. No resistance.’ Annie fought for control. ‘My father brought a lodger to the house, a sailor, a travelling man he called himself, an’ one day he saw me crying after a beating, an’ because I was upset I let him lay with me. The next day he went away, after promising to marry me. Soon after that I found I was having a baby.’

‘Go on, Annie.’

‘I wanted to kill myself, but I hadn’t the nerve, so I hid myself with a loose shawl and I went on working, doing other folks’s washing and looking after the boys.’ Her voice fell almost to a whisper. ‘Then one day Father O’Leary knocked on the door. I saw him standing there in his big black hat, carrying the walking stick that looked more like a shillelagh. So I asked him to pray to God on my behalf, and what did he do but tell Mrs Greenhalgh from the bottom house that I had got myself into trouble. He didn’t know that my father was there in the house listening, and what did
he
do but come tearing up the street with that woman, telling me they were getting married and that I’d have to go to the workhouse.’ Like a child she knuckled a tear away from her eye. ‘But I wasn’t going to no workhouse, so I walked over the top road to find work, an’ it was then that Mr Armstrong’s horse knocked me down.’

‘And the baby?’

‘I lost it.’ Annie was calming down now that the relief in speaking out was flooding through her. ‘An’ I was glad. I was happy to get rid.’

‘Under circumstances like that I would have felt exactly the same.’

Annie was so surprised she sat down again.

‘I mean it, Annie. Babies should never come where they’re not wanted. How could you have looked after it at your age, without money or a roof over your head?’

‘I was glad,’ Annie repeated. ‘I could have sung aloud I was that glad. I can’t tell you how glad I was.’

Margot shot her a shrewd glance. ‘Now tell me why you hate Mr Armstrong.’

‘Because he …’

She had been going to say she hated him because he had tried to take advantage of her that last night. That he was like all the rest, not to be trusted. Pretending to be kind to her, even treating her like a lady, talking to her, telling her she had the character and the looks to make herself into anything she wanted to be. The anger was still in her, and in that telling moment she was back in the old stone house, in the fire-lit room, held closely in the animal doctor’s arms. She could feel the hardness of his mouth on her own, feel the heat coming from him, see the way his eyes had darkened as he held her so close the breath went out of her.

But the words coming from her weren’t the words she wanted to say. There was something calming about the over-painted, plump little woman sitting so still, listening, waiting.

‘Well, Annie?’

‘I hate him because he made me see the truth,’ she said quietly.

‘Which was?’

The admission came out on a long drawn-out wail. ‘That Laurie never meant it when he said he would come back and marry me. That I will never see him again. That he never meant one word of his promise.’

‘And you still care for him?’

Slowly Annie raised her head. ‘I never did care for him. I know that now.’ Her voice rose. ‘Because of what we did I felt I had to love him, that to have done that without love would have made me like a night woman, a trollop.’

‘So the vet was right?’

Annie’s head drooped low. ‘That is why I hate him,’ she said. ‘For being right. For telling me something I should have admitted to myself a long time ago.’

Adam was flabbergasted at the way he’d come in from the fields to find Mrs Gray sitting there by the fire with Annie, gabbing away as if they were equals. And what was Annie doing wearing a dress only half-way sewed, all gaping at the bodice and showing her chemise? Why did Mrs Gray have to jump up at the sight of him as if she’d just remembered Kit Dailey sitting outside in the trap? Adam sniffed. Hardly likely. He doubted if Madam Gray cared a tinker’s cuss about anyone but herself.

‘She never came once to see Clara,’ he grumbled, when she’d gone. ‘Clara had a decent and proper respect for her betters.’ He pointed at the big box of preserves. ‘Anyroad, what did she come for? We don’t need her charity.’ He sat down and began to unlace his boots, not bothering to carry them out to the back porch. He was still smarting at the taunts shouted at him from the trap outside in the lane.

‘You’re a wily old varmint, Adam Page. Keeping her all to yourself.’ Kit Dailey had thrown back his dark head, laughing out loud. ‘Though I can’t say I blame you. They don’t grow them like your little Annie all that often.’ He had pursed his lips and whistled, rolling his eyes.

Adam could feel the blood pounding in his head. ‘Those jars and bottles are only an excuse to get inside and have a proper look at you. An’ you give her an eyeful, didn’t you? Who carried that lot in? Kit Dailey? Did he get an eyeful as well? You want to watch him. He’s bad, through and through, really bad.’

Annie tried to change the subject. ‘Mrs Gray asked me if I’d like to work afternoons up at the house.’

‘
What
did you say?’

Annie said it again. It wasn’t news that would keep, anyway. ‘Mrs Gray has asked me if I’d like to work afternoons up at the house.’

Adam’s eyes bulged. ‘And you told her no! I’m waiting to hear you told her no!’

‘I told her yes.’ Annie began to gather her bits and
pieces
together. ‘I’m to sew for her. She couldn’t believe it when I told her I’d made this dress in less than two days. She said if I could make dresses like this for her step-daughters she’d be delighted, but of course I’m being set on mainly for mending the linen, and darning and patching.’ She twirled round, almost beside herself with excitement. ‘I thought rich people just threw things away when they got torn, but that’s not the way with Mrs Gray. She wants them mended. You can be wrong about rich people, you know, Mr Page. Sometimes they can act quite ordinary.’ Annie was so pleased with herself, so chuffed about the prospect of working up at the big house, she almost danced round the table. ‘Mrs Gray said the housekeeper would see to the money side of it.’