The Travelling Man (35 page)

As she came through the doorway she snatched off her cap and shook her hair free, but when she saw him she immediately backed away.

‘There’s no need for you to do that.’ She was so lovely he could scarcely bear to look at her. ‘Harry tells me you won’t be going with them to France.’

‘No.’

‘He also told me that you’ve dropped the idea of setting up in a dress shop.’

‘That’s right.’ She sat down at the table and took up her sewing. ‘Forgive me for carrying on working, but if everything is to be ready in time I can’t let up.’

Turning a chair round, Seth sat down on it, resting his arms along its back. ‘Annie …’ He tried to speak calmly. ‘Did you really believe that eighty pounds was enough to finance all you wanted to do? If you’d discussed it with me I could have explained, given you some idea …’

‘Eighty pounds?’ She raised her eyes and looked straight at him. ‘Have you any idea just how much eighty pounds represents to someone like me? Eighty pounds would have kept my mother, father and their six children for nearly two years.’ She raised her voice. ‘Two years, Seth! Out of twenty-two shillings a week my father took two for his beer, or more when he felt like it. The rent was seven shillings, clothing club a shilling, boot and clog club another, burial insurance one and twopence, soap and soda sixpence, lamp oil a penny, doctor’s money sixpence … Do I need to tell you how much was left for food for all of us?’ She stabbed the needle into the silky material on her lap. ‘I could reckon things up to the last farthing; I could make a meal out of the dishcloth if needs must.’ She bowed her head. ‘An’ you talk about eighty pounds as if it was nothing.’

‘Why are you always so angry with me, love?’ Seth spoke with a slow deliberation. ‘What do I do that annoys you so much? You are punishing me for the things other men have done to you. Can’t you see that?’

There was an aching need inside her to cry, so she became even more angry. ‘Mrs Gray made me feel that my life was going to be so different from now on. But the truth is she can’t wait to be rid of me.’

‘She doesn’t mean it, Annie. Mrs Gray is fickle, that’s all.’ He tried to keep his tone light. ‘So why not come back with me? For the time being. Till you decide what to do next.’

There were tears glistening on her eyelashes. He saw the way she blinked them furiously away. ‘No thank you, Mr Armstrong … Seth. I’m never going to be beholden to anyone again. Eighty pounds may be a mere pittance to you, but in my way of looking at things it’s a fortune. And with a fortune behind them anyone can do anything. Because money talks!’

‘What does it say, love?’

Her chin was up in a gesture of defiance. ‘It says I never need to be beholden to anyone – to any
man
– again!’

ON THE DAY
before Annie left the house Margot’s conscience began to prick a little. Not too much, but enough to get in the way of her preparations for their long stay in France. The girls complained loudly that in their opinion Annie should be going with them.

‘If we are to attend all the parties you’ve planned, who will dress our hair?’

‘Or tell us what to wear with what?’

‘I distinctly heard you tell Annie she would be going with us.’

Dorothea had tucked a torn flounce into the waistband of her skirt, and Abigail was wearing puce with bottle green. Margot could hardly bring herself to look at them, so she left the room and banged the door behind her.

Half-way up the stairs she stopped, a hand dramatically to her heart, not wanting to admit even to herself her real reason for withdrawing her affection from Annie Clancy. How could she explain, even to herself, her feelings about Seth Armstrong? Why did it hurt so much to see him falling more and more helplessly in love? Was it possible for a mature woman to covet, to desire a younger man, while loving her own husband as much as ever? All that flirting and teasing with the animal doctor, had it been half-way serious all the time, on her side at least?

On the stool in front of her tripled mirror she leaned forward to examine her face minutely. Were those fine wrinkles on her forehead the beginning of an ugly furrowed brow? By holding her chin up like this was she deluding herself into imagining that her double chin didn’t exist? Was she turning into one of those pathetic creatures who envied youth its bloom? Was she in fact sending Annie Clancy away for reasons beneath the contempt of the intelligent compassionate woman she imagined herself to be?

She got up and turned her back on the mirror. It was all too deep and complex a situation for her to fathom, particularly today when she was feeling far from well. Lately she’d taken to waking in the night drenched with perspiration, and sometimes her cheeks would flush up as though she had a fever. She was much too young for middle-aged nuisances like that to be happening to her, surely? When they did, if they did, she would ignore them so firmly they would have no choice but to go away.

She had no need to feel this niggling sense of disquiet and guilt. Annie had been treated more than fairly,
and
now she was ready to move on Margot had freely given her advice she would have had to pay for in some places.

‘To look your best is to feel your best,’ she had said. Who could quarrel with that? ‘To look elegant always understate,’ she had said. She had even bared her soul one day, telling Annie things she had never told before. ‘On the day my husband came to bring me back from the hospital, I spent a whole hour getting ready. The specialist had told me I was never going to bear a child of my own, so I determined that when Mr Gray saw me he would see a smiling wife dressed in all her finery. You would have thought I was going to a Hunt Ball, or even to Buckingham Palace to one of the garden parties. I had my good pearls sent out to me, and I wore a hat with a feather curling all the way round the brim.’

‘You have been very kind to me.’ Annie had looked grave. ‘What would I have done without you?’

‘Survived,’ Margot had said promptly. ‘Like me.’

The next morning Margot came downstairs early wearing a pale green floating bedwrap. She smiled at Annie and held out both hands.

‘Bartram is waiting outside with the trap.’ She looked Annie up and down with a critical eye. ‘Yes. You’ll do, but you still have to learn how to put up your hair properly. It looks in a state of collapse already.’

To stop herself from crying Annie smiled. ‘The first time I saw you I wondered how you got your hair to stick up for itself like that, and I’ve been wondering ever since.’

‘The next time we meet I’ll show you,’ Margot promised insincerely. ‘Now you’d better go if Bartram’s to come back tonight.’

When the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves died away, Margot took off the pale green wrap and got back into bed.

‘Well, no one can say we didn’t do our best for her,’
she
whispered, then smiled as Harry grunted and turned over without waking up. Yes, there was no reason to feel like this. Kindness had been showered on the gardener’s girl. Her own conscience was clear. She was blameless in every way.

So why couldn’t she go back to sleep? Why, when the cock crowed three times, did she almost die of fright?

When Annie chose to sit up front with the driver he took a blanket and tucked it round her knees before laying another smaller one across her shoulders.

‘You can throw them off when the sun gets through, but there’s a nip in the air that’s more like autumn, lass. It’s more like back-end than summer; it’s a case of three fine days then a thunderstorm. You can’t rely on nowt. Still, they’ll be well out of it abroad, though it beats me why the master goes year after year, but I expect his missus takes a lot of pleasing. The money’s on her side, tha knows …’

According to the pit doctor Ed Bartram’s lungs should have been finished long ago. He was as sparse and wiry as a hungry whippet. Since working for the Gray family – mostly outdoors – his already pock-marked skin had taken on the consistency and colour of seasoned leather, but his back was still stooped from his days of crouching underground. In many ways he reminded Annie of her father, but the eyes were different. Where her father’s reflected only bitterness, Ed’s brown eyes twinkled with contentment.

He chatted on, stopping only now and again to draw a necessary breath. ‘You can tell a horse’s age, up to about eight years old, by looking at its teeth,’ he said, a couple of clip-clops further on. ‘Then you look at their legs to see it hasn’t got windgall.’

‘What’s that?’ Annie’s nerves felt so tightly drawn she was sure she would have twanged if anyone had touched her. She was grateful that Ed didn’t seem to mind in the least that the conversation was totally one-sided, in
fact
she had more than a suspicion that he preferred it that way.

‘Windgall? It’s a spongy swelling on the side of the leg; it makes a horse lame if it’s not watched, and if it gets a corn that’s no good neither. You can’t cure a horse with a corn. At least not many can. But I’d put me money on that animal chap who sees to the mester’s horses any day. I’ve seen him cut a canker from a diseased horn wi’ nowt to see by but a spluttering candle in a barn with a leaking roof. It were a pity his wife had to go that way. It’s bad enough folks starving when there’s nowt to eat in the house, but starving when there’s a full table – that’s another thing.’

‘I used to work for Mr Armstrong,’ Annie said in a small voice, but Ed wasn’t listening to any other voice but his own.

‘Aye, them hills over yon look as clean cut as if they’d been cut out with a pair of scissors. Mebbe it won’t rain after all.’ His burst of optimism seemed to depress him. ‘Them mountains make up their own minds about the weather. Depends on their moods. Allus has and allus will.’

During the next hour Annie discarded the blanket round her shoulders, sitting up straight on the wooden seat and holding on to the side as they turned into a rutted lane.

With every mile she was nearer to home. Home? She adjusted the brim of her hat to keep the sun from her face to ward off the freckles so frowned upon by Mrs Gray. It was hard to believe that so long had passed since she walked this very way, wearing boots too big, with her mother’s cloak trailing in the mud, and a man’s flat cap pulled low down over her forehead.

‘Aye,’ Ed said suddenly, as if he had been able to read her thoughts. ‘Nowt stays the same. Like the seasons, everything changes. Take them hills, now, they’ll still be here long after thee and me is dead and gone. Just listen to that quiet. There’s nowt as deafening as quiet.’

At mid-morning they stopped at a horse trough and Ed showed Annie how his horse filtered the water through its teeth, shaking it about with its nose first to get rid of the dust.

‘There’s nowt as clean as a horse,’ he said, fastening the nosebag into position.

Annie unwrapped the crusty bread and cheese packed for her by Cook that morning, but found she wasn’t hungry. Ed disappeared through a gap in the hedge, and reappeared a few minutes later doing up his trousers, still talking.

A mile or so down the long winding road she interrupted him to point out the sight of a woman bent almost double, stumbling along by the hedges. Her head was sunk low on to her chest and when Ed stopped the trap and leaned out to her, the woman carried on, giving no sign that she had heard.

‘Can we help you?’ Annie climbed down and touched the woman on a shoulder. ‘You’re ill … look, we have food, and a skip of milk.’ She bit her lips. ‘I know what it’s like to be on the road. Please – let us help you.’

The woman straightened up with obvious difficulty and stared Annie straight in the face.

‘Johnson!’ Annie stepped back a pace, but not quickly enough to avoid the stream of saliva directed full into her face.

‘
You
help
me
!’ An expression of hatred slid across the well-remembered features, distorting them into an evil mask. ‘Annie Clancy! By all that’s holy! The gardener’s little whore.’

Two claw-like hands came from inside the dusty rags, but before she could attack Ed came round the side of the trap and pulled Annie away. Lips curling, voice as hoarse as a raven’s croak, Johnson yelled out her loathing to the clear blue sky.

‘Just look at you! All dolled up for the next man who comes along. The gardener’s whore spending the gardener’s money!’ A high cackle of a laugh burst from
her
throat. ‘Got the money through lying on her back, an’ now she’s spending it on her back. You help
me
, Annie Clancy? I’d rather rot in me grave first.’

Turning her back on them, she stumbled into the hedge, righted herself and tottered on. Like a night woman far gone in drink.

Ed stared with concern at Annie’s white face. Too shocked to move, he guessed; she was standing quite still, her eyes fixed on the staggering woman making her tortuous way down the road.

‘Such hate …’ Her voice was no more than a whisper. ‘Oh, dear God, such hate. It was alive, wasn’t it? Did you sense that? That hate was a living thing.’

When Ed took his handkerchief from his top pocket and gently wiped her face, she stood like a child submitting to the ministrations of a loving father. When he helped her back into the trap she sat hunched, her gloved hands joined tightly on her lap. It was an attitude of fear. Ed recognised it straight away. It was a tensing of the muscles against what had been, and what might be to come. He flicked the reins and urged the horse to a trotting pace, his lined face creased into anxiety. Fear … it could be a terrible thing. He’d known the smell and the taste of it many a time.

‘All right, lass?’

She nodded, tried to smile, so he let her be.

That had been fear when he’d been buried with a wall of rock between him and his mates and it seemed he would slowly die. Fear when the doctor told him his lungs were shot – riddled with holes like the kitchen sieve. Had he made up his mind in that moment that he was going to survive? But the worst fear of all had been when his wife died, and he didn’t know how to go on without her for a while. Folks had said that time would heal but unless they’d been down the same road they didn’t know what they were talking about. The pain lessened, he’d grant them that, but he was never quite the same.