The Travelling Man (29 page)

‘Annie!’ Margot put up a hand. ‘You have a visitor, dear.’

From the tall winged chair with its back to Annie a man emerged, a fair-haired man with strangely light eyes. He was smiling at her.

‘Mr Armstrong!’ Annie didn’t know what to say. He looked so different for one thing. Thinner in the face, shabbier, and surely Mrs Martindale would never have turned him out in a shirt with a frayed collar?

How different
she
looked. Seth thought she was thinner in the face, with cheekbones that showed, and what was she doing wearing a dress made for waltzing in? He came round the chair and held out his hand.

‘I’ve come to take you back, Annie.’

‘Why? Have you sent Biddy away?’

Margot sat up. That was quick. They were squaring up to each other as if they were old protagonists with a few more scores to settle. No polite preamble to their greetings. She leaned forward, in order not to miss a thing.

‘No. Biddy’s still there. I’ve come to take you home.’

‘To
your
home?’ The humiliation and the anger were still in her. What was he talking about, take her home? She stared directly at him. ‘I saw you riding away from the Eccles’s farm.’

‘I didn’t know you were there, Annie.’

‘But you must have …’

He spread his hands wide. ‘Suffice to say I didn’t.’

Margot held her breath. She had known Seth Armstrong for a long time and he never used words like ‘suffice’. There was a tiny nerve jumping near his jawline. He was clenching his hands into fists, too. She looked from one to the other. There was a ‘situation’ here, or she was much mistaken.

‘Could you tell me where your gardener’s working today?’ Seth turned to her. ‘I’ll have a word with him and explain that I’m taking Annie back with me.’

‘You mean
now
?’ Annie looked at Mrs Gray. Had she heard that?

Margot was shaking her head. ‘Sorry, Seth. You’ll
have
to go down to the stables. Harry’s bound to be there. He’ll tell you.’

Nodding his thanks, Seth strode quickly to the door, shouting instructions at Annie over his shoulder. ‘Be ready in half an hour …’

‘Well!’ Annie’s face was a study. ‘Did you hear all that, Mrs Gray?’

‘Every single word.’

‘An’do you think I should do as Mr Armstrong tells me and be ready for him in half an hour? As if I was his slave? As if I belonged to him?’

‘I think he imagines that you do, Annie.’

There was a bleakness in the way Margot spoke, a certain hostility in the way she stared at the girl in the vividly blue dress. Once, a long time ago, she’d been able to reject men just for the satisfaction of seeing them tremble before her. Sure of herself, sure they would come back for more, she had played them off one against the other, till one day she’d realised they had all gone off and married younger girls, leaving her to accept the proposal of a middle-aged widower with two daughters who preferred horses to a new step-mama.

Suddenly she got up and swept from the room. ‘You won’t always be young, Annie,’ she said. She spoke without kindness and with a certainty that seemed to give her a deal of satisfaction.

Since Annie had sent the animal doctor away with a flea in his ear – her own words – Adam felt a lot more settled. It was true he hated her working up at the house, but the cottage didn’t seem to be neglected and he certainly wasn’t. His meals were always ready, his clothes kept clean and mended, though Annie did always stand by his chair of a Friday evening holding out her hand for her wages.

He was careful not to touch her and quick to notice how she flinched away if he came too near. But when she brought the lamp from the dresser to the table of
an
evening and set light to the wick, he couldn’t keep from staring. Staring didn’t cost him anything.

After she’d lowered the globe over the flame it bathed the whole room in a soft yellowy light. She looked so lovely sitting there with her sewing he had to clench his hands at times to stop himself from reaching out for her, though he knew better than that. Once he had come up behind her at the slopstone, so that as she turned round their faces were only inches apart. He had seen the way her eyes became wary, guarded, in the few seconds before she moved swiftly away, and he knew the time was not yet. She liked to chatter, and he would listen, watching her lips move, hardly heeding what she was saying.

Christmas came and went, as the seasons came and went, uneventfully, with a January so wet it was more like spring.

One night Annie sat at the table writing a letter and, fearsome less it was to the animal doctor, Adam asked her straight out who she was writing to.

‘A lady who lived two doors down from us.’ Annie put her pencil down. ‘She looked after her mother as well as working in the mill. Her mother was bedfast, and I’ve had a feeling for a long time now that the old lady has died.’ She began to write again. ‘So the best way to find out is to ask.’

After she had gone up to bed Adam took the letter down from the dresser-shelf and examined the address. A slow reader himself, able to write only in capitals, he couldn’t get over the neatness of Annie’s joined-up script with small, perfectly-formed letters. He traced the name and address with his finger: Edith Morris. Miss Edith Morris. He put the letter back, took up his candlestick and climbed the stairs to his bed.

He didn’t like the idea of Annie getting in touch with her past life. He drew the stone hot-water bottle up from the foot of the bed and cradled it to him. Still, writing to an old spinster about her mother was surely harmless enough.

When he woke up after an uneasy twitching sleep, the sky was beginning to redden, and the frost had at last arrived.

Edith showed Annie’s letter to Mick the minute he arrived for his reading lesson.

‘For practice you can read it aloud to me,’ she said, handing him the single sheet of paper.

Mick took it from her with a sinking heart. He had begun to think that Miss Morris had stopped bothering about finding young Annie Clancy since that wasted visit to the Eccles’s farm. Since then life had been so good to him, he could hardly believe his luck. For one thing he’d got himself a regular job bagging coal up to put on the carts. Forty on each cart, packed that tight you’d a job to separate them. He could have a bag on the weighing machine and up on the cart quicker than any man in the yard. It was the strength in him, he’d told Miss Morris, holding out an arm for her to feel his muscle.

He wasn’t feeling strong now as he began to read, stumbling over each word, running a finger along the lines.

Dear Miss Morris,

I know you will be surprised to hear from me after such a long time, but I have stopped writing to my father. He said he would throw any letters I might write on to the back of the fire, and that is what he must be doing. But I would like to know how they are, especially the boys. Also I hope your mother is well. I hope you don’t mind me writing to you. I am housekeeping in the mornings and working in a big house doing their sewing in the afternoons. I am well and happy.

Hoping you are the same.

Annie Clancy

He handed the letter back, knowing he’d made a bad job
of
reading it, accepting as he stumbled over every single word that this life, this new shining life, would come to an end now that Miss Morris knew where to find Annie Clancy.

She looked as pleased as punch with herself. He’d noticed that the moment she had let him in. And there was a tantalising smell coming from the fire-oven. Oxtail, he guessed, slow cooked till the meat dropped off the jellied bones, with a sago pudding maybe afterwards, thick and creamy with a nutmeg crisp skin on top. All that would end now. It would be Annie Clancy getting her feet underneath the table, not him. He stared into the fire, sunk deep into a terrible despair.

Edith had gone quiet, too. She could read this big rough-spoken man like a book. She knew the effort it took him to present himself clean and tidy for his lessons since he worked as a coal bagger down at the yard. And she knew exactly how her finding Annie’s address would have affected him.

‘When are you fetching her back?’ he said now. Then he made the supreme sacrifice. ‘I’ll come with you if you want.’ He stared at Edith, a dull hopeless stare revealing all the terrible dread that had been growing in his heart day by day.

‘I haven’t thought yet,’ Edith said. She couldn’t bear to see the expression in Mick’s eyes. It was as if his soul was revealed there for her to see. He was curling his big hands into fists, actually blinking to force back tears. He was suddenly disintegrating right there before her.

‘I’d best not come any more,’ he said in his low rumble of a voice. ‘Best make it a clean break before Annie moves in.’ He got up to go, snatching his jacket off the hook behind the door.

‘Mick!’ Edith felt rooted to her chair. His reaction to the letter hadn’t surprised her, but she had never expected it to be so dramatic, so violent, so final.

‘Mick!’ She stepped outside on to the pavement, calling after him, but it was too late.

Within five minutes of leaving the cosy room, the fire built so that it roared up the chimney-back, Mick was down at the pub, pushing his way rudely through the men crowding round the bar. Shouting for a bloody drink at the top of his voice.

SO GRANDMA MORRIS
was dead. Annie folded Edith’s letter and stored it away in the spare teapot on the dresser.

‘Well? What does it say?’

Adam knew it wasn’t any of his business, but he had to know. Ever since Annie had written to this Miss Morris he had lived in dread of her turning up at the cottage door, or worse still of Annie’s father coming to claim her once he found out there was no illegitimate baby to bring them shame.

Annie didn’t seem put out by his curiosity. ‘She says the boys are all right, and that Billy is going down the pit when he leaves school at Easter. She says my father takes his wife out every Friday night, that they walk down the street to the Ram’s Head arm in arm – would you believe it?’

‘So that’s all right then.’ Adam was so relieved he could have shouted aloud. Instead, he went out of the back door, hiding his feelings by whistling under his breath. Annie wasn’t going to leave him to go back to her old home. Things were going on all right there; this Miss Morris had said so.

‘Are you going to write back?’ he asked that evening, as they sat over the fire, Annie busy with sewing she’d brought with her from the big house.

‘I don’t think so.’ Annie put down the length of crimson silk she was fringing and hemming by hand.
‘She
says I’ll always be welcome, but from the tone of the letter it’s obvious Miss Morris doesn’t want to know any more than I’ve told her. I put myself beyond the pale when I got into trouble. It’s just the sort of letter I imagined she would write – no feeling to it at all.’

Adam wished she wouldn’t mention the trouble. It bothered him even to remember it. When Clara had first told him he hadn’t liked it then. Annie was so lovely, so untouched, like a spring morning when the first cowslip appears dew-wet in the meadow grass.

‘Aye, best let well alone,’ he said.

Edith Morris thought she must be going mad. She was as lonely as ever now that Mick no longer came, and too proud to admit the reason for her despair. What was he, after all, but a rough-spoken Irish labourer who had warmed himself by her fire, eaten her food, pretended he wanted to learn how to read and write?

Why had she written in that cold way to young Annie? Why? When for so long she had dreamed of the day she would find her and bring her here to live. Now the thought of the red-haired girl sitting opposite to her in the chair where Mick had sat filled her with pain. Besides, Annie’s letter hadn’t been written by a lost and bewildered girl at the end of her tether. The baby was no more and Annie was well and happy. She had said so. She didn’t need to be rescued. She was young and strong with all her life ahead of her.

Edith got up from her chair and walked slowly upstairs to her tiny bedroom at the front of the house. It was cold and damp. It had never known the warmth of a fire since the day the house was built, and in the tiny grate with its iron canopy Edith had pleated a fan of newspaper which she changed regularly once a month when she gave the room a thorough bottoming.

She paid no attention to the cold. It had seeped into her bones years ago and she accepted it as normal. Setting the candle down on her bedside table, she knelt by the
wooden
cross which stood on a lace-edged runner on top of a chest-of-drawers.

‘Dear God, help me to cease this fevering of my blood. Thou knowest no man has ever touched me, so why should I be acting like a young and foolish girl? A foolish virgin, I should have said …’ She felt the tears trickle through her fingers. ‘Bring me to my senses, Lord, and show me the true way to Thy salvation. Amen.’

It was a terrible prayer to have said, a dreadful admission of weakness. But prayers were answered if the Lord saw fit to answer them. For the next few weeks she went as usual to the mill in the pitch-dark every morning, stood at her looms and concentrated on her work. She was a model weaver, sticking to the rules and abiding by them. She wore her hair high and close to her head to avoid the danger of it being drawn into the ever moving belts; she paid no fines for faulty cloth, and she never needed to have her pay docked for arriving late in the mornings. She was, as usual, beyond reproach in every way.

But spring was on its way, even though the watery sun did no more than touch briefly the top half of the backyard wall. Edith walked home in the light, let herself in to her empty ordered house, and wept.

The wanting, the longing, the aching for the sight of a grizzled head and the sound of a deep rough voice in mid-curse was a pain deep down in her abdomen. ‘Belly’, Mick would undoubtedly have said. Every time a knock came to the door she expected to open it and see him standing there, holding his cap in his hand, shuffling his big feet, blurting out how bloody stupid he’d been for stopping away so long.

But he never came and during a sleepless night, when the March wind rattled the sash-window till she was sure it would collapse into the street below, Edith shouted aloud at the God who seemed to have turned His back on her.