The Travelling Man (3 page)

‘Not in my line, I’m afraid.’ Laurie sat back patting his satisfied stomach. ‘But thanks all the same.’ He had walked
away
, leaving husband and wife at each other’s throats, squaring up to each other like a couple of fighting cocks.

He smiled at the memory. ‘No, I’ve never been down a mine, Miss Clancy.’ If this ragamuffin had resembled, however remotely, a woman, he would have had her on his knee whistle-quick. As it was, she was best humoured if he was going to get a taste of that stew.

‘But you’ve been across the sea?’

He grinned. ‘You could say I’ve been across the sea.’

‘Where to?’

Laurie turned his head away from the tantalising smell. Any minute now and he’d be down on his knees pleading with her to give him a bowlful of the magnificently bodied broth, or whatever she chose to call it.

‘Oh, to lots of places,’ he forced himself to say. ‘Too many to tell.’

‘To India?’

‘Yes. To India.’

She was at the table now, sawing away at a cob of crusty bread. He clenched both hands hard to stop himself from leaping out of the chair and grabbing a piece. He set the chair rocking. ‘A mucky, dirty place, India.’

Immediately the ragamuffin stopped what she was doing and pointed the knife at him.

‘
Mucky
?’ Her voice shook. ‘I learnt about India when I went to school, and my teacher didn’t say nothing about it being mucky! I’ve seen pictures of India in a book. The sky was blue, and all the people were dressed in white.
White
, Mr Yates. Out in the streets in white.’ She put the knife down on the table. ‘You wear a white blouse or a white shirt here and it’s mucky before you’ve had time to fasten the buttons. The dirt’s in the air here, an’ if it’s damp, which it usually is, you fetch the washing in covered in sooty flecks. I wash for three families round here as well as my own, so I know what I’m talking about.’ She attacked the bread again. ‘You go down that mine, Mr Yates, an’ you’ll soon wish you were back in India looking spotless.’

‘You mean to tell me you take in washing? As well as looking after your family? You don’t look old enough to have left school.’

Annie ignored him. ‘An’ what about when you’re out at sea? Is the
sea
mucky? Is the
air
mucky? Best thing you can do is go right back to where you’ve come from before you end up like me dad, and like our Georgie.’ Her voice rose. ‘An’ like our Billy, our Timmy, our Eddie and our John. Because they’ll all go the same way once they’ve left school and gone down the mine.’

She tossed the pieces of bread one by one on to a plate, her tongue protruding slightly as she counted them.

‘Want me to tell you something for nothing, Mr Yates?’

The pain was back in her ear; it was a frightening pain, as if a red-hot needle was being poked into it. That was the ear her father always boxed, him being righthanded, and lately there had been tell-tale yellow marks on her pillow in the mornings. As though something was festering away inside. She felt the shameful prick of tears behind her eyes.

‘One of these fine days I’m going to walk away from this place an’ never come back. Just as soon as our little John is big enough to look after himself.’ A sob rose in her throat. ‘I don’t know where I’ll go but I’ll find a place somewhere.’ She held out her hands. ‘I can work with these till I drop. I’m strong as an ox. Me mother used to say I was the strongest lad in the family.’ Her voice was ragged with tears. ‘When she was on her last I could lift her in and out of bed.’ She cupped her hands. ‘Before she died, her neck was no bigger than this, an’ her wrists …’ she made a circle with a finger and thumb ‘… as tiny as that. She was wore out with having babies, one after another. She had nine altogether, but lost three after I was born. There was only eleven months between our Eddie and our John. When she died she only had half a shroud because me dad went out and drank his wages away.
Half
a shroud, Mr Yates! To save money!’

The needle in her ear was twisting itself round and round. She couldn’t help putting a hand over it. It was driving her mad. It was making her speak so freely to this stranger, she could hardly believe the words coming from her mouth. It was as though she was saying things that had been dammed up inside her for a long, long time.

‘An’ I’ll tell you another thing. Some day I’m going to have a house with a piece of carpet on the floor, an’ I’m going to have a tablecloth on a table. A white lace tablecloth, Mr Yates, that’ll come up lovely each time it’s washed and starched, an’ keep its whiteness too with a bit of dolly-blue in the rinsing water.’ She banged her hand down hard on the big square table. ‘An’ it won’t be this shape. It’ll be round, so that the cloth can fall down in folds.’ She clasped her hands together. ‘I saw one once, an’ I’ve never forgotten it.’

Laurie Yates didn’t know what to make of this young lass standing there, trying not to cry, pouring out her heart to him, a stranger she’d met only a few minutes ago. He was hungry and tired. He needed food and a bed. In that order, so with an effort he summoned up the charm that never failed him.

‘I’ll buy you a lace tablecloth, love. When I get my first pay packet I’ll be away to the nearest market to pick out the whitest and laciest cloth I can find.’

When she rushed out to the back he stretched both arms above his head and grinned, fully aware of the effect his words had had on Annie. He closed his eyes to shut out the sight of the bread so tantalisingly near. She’d counted them too carefully not to miss a piece, and if he was to get his feet underneath the table he had to tread warily.

Something told him he might just be in luck here. Missing his ship in Liverpool hadn’t dismayed him for long. It had been his own fault anyway, dallying with a night woman with a tongue on her like a whiplash. Her temper had made him laugh, and the more he’d laughed the madder she’d got. He could still hear her
strident
voice as she’d yelled abuse after him, shaking her fist through the open window of her room in the tall, overcrowded house near the docks.

‘I don’t need to work for bloody nowt, sailor!’ she’d shouted, and the thought of her slack body had bothered him for a few miles, until he shrugged her memory away.

Now, after being on the road for almost two weeks, he was ready to get his head down for a while. Sleeping rough had made him thankful that the fine weather had held. The long walk had soothed the restlessness inside him, brought him to some kind of peace with himself. Now he had run out of money, he accepted it was either find work or starve.

What was she doing, the strange young girl, out there at the back? Letting the tears come, he guessed. Splashing her face with cold water from the tap her father had boasted about.

‘Most summers,’ Jack Clancy had explained, ‘the houses at the top of our street are without water for three months or more. There’s just not enough for the source to supply all the houses. It’s all got to be fetched. Every bloody drop.’

Had young Annie been carrying the water up the steep cobbled street all summer long? Bucket by backbreaking bucket? Laurie assumed a hang-dog expression as she came through the door. He picked up his bundle.

‘I’ll be on my way. God go with you, Miss Clancy.’

That did it. Annie had grown up with a lot of respect for the Almighty, even though her mother had become a non-believer and her father was a lapsed Catholic.

‘Do you believe in God, Mr Yates?’

Laurie, sensing his luck could be on the turn, immediately crossed himself. ‘I walk with Him. Every step of the way,’ he said.

Annie knew when she was beat. Folding her arms, she nodded sternly at the rag rug in front of the stone hearth.

‘You’ll have to sleep on that. There’s no bed. An’ just for the night – that’s all.’

‘You’re an angel of mercy, Miss Clancy.’ Laurie doffed an imaginary cap.

‘You’ll soon find different,’ Annie said.

A clatter of clogs on the cobbles heralded the four young Clancy boys coming home from school. Annie moved towards the great soot-blackened pan on the trivet, nodded at the bench drawn up to the table.

‘Get yourself a seat, Mr Yates. It’ll be a bit of a squash, but that’s your lookout. If I can make this stew go round seven, I don’t suppose one more will make much difference. You’ll have to fill up with bread.’

Laurie was at the table in a flash. Annie could read his face easily. He was as hungry as a hunter. Sick from the want of food, she guessed. Her own expression softened for a moment, then hardened again. What was he but another man, another mouth to feed? As black-haired and wily as the boys coming through the door.

‘Billy, Timmy, Eddie, John.’ Laurie chanted their names as they formed a semi-circle to stare at him. ‘Bless the bed that I lay on.’

‘Who’s yon fella, our Annie?’ Billy, coming up to eleven, obviously reckoned nothing of the stranger sitting in what was normally his place at the table. ‘Has he come to his tea?’

Annie half smiled an apology at Laurie. ‘We’re not used to company,’ she said in way of explanation.

‘Except when Father O’Leary comes.’ Timmy at ten, the serious clever one, took everything that was said to him literally. ‘Once when our Annie had made an oven-bottom cake he scoffed the lot.’

‘An’ licked the butter from his plate.’ Eddie, at eight already the black sheep of the family, narrowed dark eyes into wicked slits.

‘The cheeky monkey,’ little John added, wanting to get in on the act. Then he sat on the end of the bench and
wriggled
his way along till he came close to Laurie. ‘I got whacked at school today,’ he confided. ‘For spittin’.’

‘How far?’ Laurie wanted to know, and they all burst out laughing.

That was the moment Annie decided that as long as he didn’t overstay his welcome, Mr Yates could stop on for a while.

She was very quiet as she ladled out the full-bodied stew. Her father and Georgie sidled in and took their places at the table as promptly as if she’d stood at the door and banged a gong. It was a long time since she’d heard laughter like that round the table. The boys were looking at Mr Yates as if he’d dropped in from heaven, listening to him spellbound. And her father obviously thought he was a fine fellow.

Annie supposed he
was
quite a cut above the young men roundabouts. It was his brown skin, she supposed, and the different way he had of speaking. There was an open-air look about him that set him apart. She passed him the last piece of bread.

‘Do you mean that your grandma was a real proper gypsy, Mr Yates?’

Annie didn’t need to raise her head to know who had asked that question. Timmy wanted to know about everything. He had what his teacher called an ‘enquiring mind’, even at ten years old. Now his small face was puckered into a grave fascination.

‘I learned about gypsies at school. They was in a book, with a picture of them cooking rabbits in a pot over a fire in a field. They come from Egypt millions of years ago.’

Billy gave his brother a sharp dig, furious at not being the centre of attraction. ‘Gypsies are dirty,’ he said loudly.

Laurie wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t witnessed what happened next. In one bound Annie was behind her brother, yanking him from his seat on the bench and shoving him towards the door.

‘Out!’ she shouted. ‘An’ if you come back before bedtime you’ll get the leatherin’ of your life.’ She sat down and smiled at Laurie, changing her expression and her way of speaking. ‘I apologise for my brother’s shocking manners, Mr Yates. He’s old enough to know better. Would you care for a drop more stew?’

Subduing a shout of laughter, Laurie passed his plate over. ‘Your daughter’s a very good cook,’ he told Jack, sitting morose and silent at the other end of the table.

‘When she bethinks herself.’ Jack stood up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Which isn’t often. I’ll see you later on.’

Laurie looked at Annie to judge her reaction to her father’s behaviour, but the polite smile was still curving her mouth.

‘My father suffers with his chest,’ she explained. ‘Like most of the men round here.’ She passed the steaming plate over. ‘It makes him nowt as a wasp at times. No, you
can’t
leave the table!’ she shouted at the boys, altering her tone and her accent with bewildering speed. Then changing back, she addressed Laurie again. ‘They can be little buggers at times,’ she told him in cultured tones.

‘Don’t have them stay on my account.’ Laurie fell into the rhythm of her speaking. ‘I find this stew delicious, Miss Clancy.’

‘Miss Clancy!’ Georgie made to follow his father out of the house. ‘Cheese and flippin’ rice. Pity our dad’s not heard that. He’d wet himself laughing.’

‘It’s only our Annie,’ John explained kindly. ‘She’s not Miss Clancy, mister. She’s
Annie
.’

‘Would you like me to tell your fortune? Like a
proper
gypsy?’ Laurie took John’s hand and turned it over. ‘Let me see now.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘That’s your life-line.’ He traced his finger across the grubby palm. ‘Ah, yes. You’re going to live to at least a hundred. And judging by what I see here you’re going to be rich and live in a castle.’

‘You’re having him on, mister.’ Timmy held out his hand. ‘Does it say I’ll be a teacher?’

Laurie stroked his chin. ‘Well, let me see now. Ah yes, I see a glittering career ahead of you. I’d have to look into a crystal ball to see more detail, but if you want to be a teacher, then it looks promising. Very promising.’

Annie began gathering the plates together. Her mother would have said the lodger talked through his hat. ‘Like an ’apenny book,’ she’d have said, putting this unusual man in his proper place. Her mother had been able to weigh folk up after a first glance. It was a funny thing, but even though she had been dead for four years now, Annie found herself seeing most things through her mother’s eyes. Sometimes she even heard her voice, and once she’d whipped round, half expecting to see the ghost of the quiet little woman standing behind her.

‘I’ll tell
your
fortune if you like, Miss Clancy.’

There he was again, trying to get round her with his Romany ways, just as he was getting round the boys. Apart from Billy who had no intention of being charmed by anybody. Eddie had just been told that he would be going on a long journey to a far-off land.