The Travelling Man (37 page)

Mary, his first wife, had been pregnant when he married her, but they’d had their bit of fun and he was willing to pay for it by marrying her. He got up again and began his pacing. He’d never forget the relief on her parents’ faces when, hand in hand, they’d said they were getting married. In the street of tall brick houses up by the Corporation Park in Blackburn a little bastard would have put paid to all her father’s big ideas. Superintendent at the nearby Methodist Sunday School,
spouting
from the pulpit as a lay-preacher, kow-towing to the Town Clerk in his position of clerk in the accounts department, oh aye, Mary’s father set a lot of store on his good name. Even though his daughter marrying a miner was a bitter pill to swallow, he’d stuck by her till the ring was safely on her finger.

Then the severance took over. Jack curled his lip. Not even when Annie was born did they visit, even though it was a safe bet that Mary’s apology for a father was telling about the compassion of his Lord from the bare pulpit in chapel. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.’ Jack wouldn’t put it past him using that as his text.

‘It takes a man to make a girl,’ his mates had teased him six months after the wedding when Annie was born. Jack could still remember the pride in him as he’d looked down at the tiny puckered face and held out his finger for her to take in a light and clinging grasp. ‘A proper father’s girl,’ folks would say, as she held his hand to walk up the street, a right little princess in the dresses her mother could make out of remnants from the material stall on the market.

Then one morning, when the sky outside was dark and the rain swept down spattering against the window, they had overslept, lying in each other’s arms in the billowing feather bed. It was in the days before they had sunk the second shaft, when jobs were hard to find, and the day after the pit deputy had warned Jack about the amount of stone in his tub.

‘One more like this. One more late morning. One more stepping out of line, and you’re
out
! Think on!’

Jack could remember as if it was yesterday, staring at the clean-shaven face with the tell-tale markings on it. He had actually looked at the ground and apologised, swearing it would never happen again. Knowing he would have licked the deputy’s boots if that would keep him his job. The stern and unyielding man was long since gone, but Jack could still remember him with a deep unforgiving loathing. Even as he was obeyed he
had
been despised, but what was the bloody alternative with a wife and child and another on the way? Jack lifted his head and saw his distorted reflection in the large brass knob on the bed-end.

How had what should have been no more than a normal row ended so disastrously? Jack covered his grotesque image with a hand. He was shouting at her because he was going to be late again, and she was yelling back at him because she felt sick and the fire wouldn’t light. She was hugging her neck-shawl round her; she was shivering in the early dawn. The street outside was quiet, with the early shift already on their way down the mine, standing motionless in the cage, bull-necked, their shoulders sloping forward as if they were already at the face. Jack could even remember the way his thoughts had run that morning.

How in God’s name had his angry words goaded Mary into bursting out with the truth? What had he said to inflame her till she lost all control? Was it the seeping cold in the fireless room? The pitch-dark sky outside? The coming here to live after living in a house with a square of carpet on the floor, and cups and plates that matched. Was it her saucerless existence that had finally cracked her?

To the end of his days Jack would never know, but one thing was sure. He had known from that minute that never again would he be able to look upon Annie with love. Even now, after all those years, he could still hear his young wife’s voice; he could still smell the acrid smell of the ashes she had been raking out from the grate till she stood up with the shovel in her hand. Is this all there was? she wanted to know. Was this the way her life was set from now on? Was this existing from day to day a marriage?

‘You want to think you’re lucky to have a ring on your finger.’ Why had he said that? Why had she answered him straight off telling him something he would have given his right arm not to hear.

‘I never meant to tell you,’ she had sobbed. ‘But there was another man, a married man, and I went with him just once.’

‘And he is Annie’s father.’ Jack spoke what he instinctively knew to be the truth. In the time it took him to say it, his love for Annie died.

After two dreadful days of weeping, with him threatening to leave, with Mary saying she would kill herself, they had come to some sort of compromise. It must never be mentioned again. In the eyes of his mates it would make him appear as less than a man. He’d be a laughing stock, and that he could never stomach.

Now, seeing Annie dressed up, hearing her speak, the agony was there again, the deep festering anguish that came on him every time he looked on his first-born child. He began to tremble. Mary had sworn that Annie could – might possibly – be his daughter, but there was not one feature, gesture or mannerism to suggest that the beautiful girl downstairs could be flesh of his flesh. She was her mother’s daughter all right. She’d proved that, hadn’t she?

He winced as a sudden burst of raucous laughter spiralled upstairs. His second wife was a blab-mouth and a slut, and yet … and yet …

He turned his head from side to side as he remembered Annie’s mother sitting quietly by the fire, her sewing on her lap. Small, subdued, a little brown mouse of a woman, with a spirit that had been seared out of her the day she had told the truth and known from that moment that he would never forgive her, never forget.

Wrenching open the top drawer of the chest by the wall, Jack rummaged among the untidy jumble of old socks and unironed shirts, and took out a folded letter.

‘Here!’ he said, clattering his way back down the stairs. ‘Read that!’ The gloating expression on his face sent a prickle of fear down Annie’s spine, but she took the folded sheet of paper and began to read. ‘Out loud! So Florrie here can hear it.’ He gripped Annie’s wrist,
forcing
her up against the table. ‘Let’s be knowing what happens to women who will lay with anybody.’

‘Leave go of me!’

This was not the terrified girl who had once cowered at his touch, shrank from him with pleading in her eyes. There was a strength in her that surprised him as she twisted away from him, as she put the width of the table between them.

‘I’ll read it. To myself,’ she said quietly.

The letter was written in pencil, faded now, but the message was clear. Laurie Yates had written to say that he was never coming back again; that he had seen the Light and gone back to his wife and two children, to try to make amends to them for his wandering years. He was never going back to sea again, he swore, or down another mine. He was sorry for making a promise he couldn’t keep but he would always have pleasing memories of a girl he had once known by the name of Annie Clancy.

When she raised her head the gloating, sly, satisfied expression on her father’s face was an obscenity. For a long moment there was silence, even the rocking-chair was still.

‘If I had received this letter when it first came, it would have broken my heart.’ She paused, her dark blue eyes steady. ‘But now it doesn’t matter. You kept it too long, don’t you see. Nothing in it can hurt me now.’

Moving round the table, she stared quite calmly into the fire, down at the letter, then directly at him. Jack was struck again by the quiet dignity in her, a way of standing, of holding her head, that had always set her apart from the yelling, fighting, Clancy family. Her mother had been just the same, a cut above, dignified even when her life was anything but, and he had worshipped the difference. He felt a choking sensation in his thick bull-neck.

Annie held the letter over the fire for a moment before letting it drop into the flames.

‘That’s that,’ she said softly. ‘He’ll always be a travelling man, it’s in his blood, but I’ll tell you something – it would take a lot more than a length of blue ribbon to make me that trusting again.’ She looked straight at Jack. ‘It’s not the mistakes we make, it’s what we do afterwards that counts.’

There was a droop about her that belied the flippancy of her words. Jack was gazing at her, seeing her as the little girl who had once walked up the street with her hand in his. He swallowed hard, might have stretched out a hand towards her, but on that instant Florrie set the chair rocking with an irritating rhythm that wiped the passing gleam of understanding from his face.

Annie could have been echoing her own mother’s words. She was even standing in the same spot, by the fire, a mute pleading in her eyes. Over and over again her mother had cried out that wasn’t everyone allowed to behave like a fool, make a mistake, all right then,
sin
, just once in their lives?

‘Is there to be no future for us because I made one mistake?’ she had sobbed. ‘Just one bad mistake?’

‘Don’t most folks make a fool of themselves just once in their lives?’ Annie asked then.

Jack’s anger flared as bright and fierce as the flames dancing up the chimney-back. In that instant the murder was in his heart again. When he raised his hand it was stayed by a grip of steel. As he gawped in astonishment, his features out of flunter by the force of his emotions, Florrie’s voice was the outraged bellow of a charging bull. Cheeks wobbling, pig eyes starting from her head, she confronted him.

‘Nay you don’t, Jack Clancy! You’re not belting her while I’m here to stop it. Your Annie brings out the very devil in you. Always has done, from what I’ve heard.’

‘Do you want to know why, woman?’

Florrie had him by the lapels of his pitjacket. She was hissing into his face, jowls working convulsively.

‘Do you think I’m daft, you silly bugger? Do you think
me
and a lot more have never wondered where that red hair come from? One copper-knob among a family of black-haired little lads?’ When he hit her she fell back against the table, clutching her face. ‘Go on! Tell Annie she’s not yours! Set her free! Stop her trying to make you like her. Or give her your blessing and let me put the kettle on and brew us all a nice cup of tea.’

She was amazing, she was unbelievable. When Jack began to sob and shake she pushed him down into his chair to stand over him, hands on the wooden arms.

‘Well? Can she stay? Or can’t you spare the lass a sup of tea?’

SETH HAD NEVER
driven his horse as hard before. There was a certainty in him that he had to get to Annie before she saw her father.

It was the memory of her face as she’d talked about Jack Clancy; it was the memory of the weals on her back, the distinctive mark of a large belt buckle, and it was the knowledge that the heavy blows had perforated an eardrum. All this spurred him on through the early evening of a day that had been more like April, with its slanting sunshine and sharp heavy showers.

He had thought to meet Bartram making his way back, but instead took a short cut, leaving the main road and branching off into a lane fringed by grassy borders, only just wide enough for trap and horse.

The superficial friendship between him and Margot Gray was vanished for ever. She had smiled first at his concern for Annie, then laughed, trying to tease him out of his anxiety.

‘Let Annie Clancy go, Seth! It’s time she went home.’
She
had led the way into the drawing-room. ‘Those kind of people always go back to where they were born in the end. She was a girl of the streets. She belongs there. She’ll marry some young collier or some millhand. He’ll beat her every Friday after he’s drunk most of his wages away. She’ll have a baby a year, and grow fat, and the money Adam left her will be squandered in the first few months. Those people don’t know how to budget; it’s a hand-to-mouth existence. It’s what she was used to, Seth. Let her alone. She’s even got the money with her, sewed into her clothes. Can you believe the stupidity of that?’

He had walked away from her to look out of the window, hardly able to control his voice. ‘Have you stopped to think what’s happened to Annie since she left home?’He whirled round, jerking his chin up out of the soft collar of his leather over-jacket. ‘Any kindness she’s been shown has evaporated just as she was getting used to it. Time after time. She’s started to trust, then been let down. By me, you, Adam …’

‘Don’t forget the sailor, the travelling man.’ Margot was totally unmoved. ‘Why is Annie always the victim, I wonder? Does she cast herself in that role on purpose, knowing that men fall soft for her wide-eyed appeal?’

Seth rounded on her. ‘Don’t you see that life turns some of us into victims? Fate, luck, environment? Circumstances, Margot. The very accident of our birth?’

‘Come now, Seth.’ She had gone to him, raised her over made-up face to his.

He turned away from her scented breath. ‘Devoid of all this …’ he swept an arm to encompass the over-stuffed opulence of the pink and grey drawing-room ‘… do you think
you
would have lived through what Annie has had to live through, coming out of it in the end with your spirit unbroken, your courage intact?’

‘Mon ami, mon ami …’ The look in her eyes had been unmistakable, the swivel of her wide hips a clear invitation. ‘You are bewitched, just as all the others were
bewitched
. Wake up, my dear … my very dear one …’ She pressed herself against him.

Seth took her firmly by the arms and put her away, seeing clearly for the first time the grotesquely piled hair, the flesh – wrinkled like the skin on a glass of hot milk – flowing from the top of her low-cut muslin dress. Her eyes, misted with emotion, were fixed on him with a naked longing that revolted him.

Margot Gray was no fool. In that moment she saw the calculating expression in the silver-light eyes and, worst of all, the disgust on his face. She stepped back as smartly as if he had slapped her, mistress of her emotions in an instant.

‘We go to France tomorrow,’ she said, speaking through clenched teeth. ‘We will be away for almost three months. You know our address, but you will not be writing to Harry about the animals, his livestock, because they are no longer your responsibility. I shall tell him that you made advances to me.’