The Travelling Man (4 page)

‘To Manchester?’ Eddie had wanted to know, his eyes round with awe.

‘To London,’ Laurie smiled. ‘To see Buckingham Palace.’ He gave Annie an impudent wink.

She held out her hand, wiping it first on her skirt. ‘Go on then. Make something nice up for me.’

‘I only say what I
see
.’ Laurie bent his dark curly head over her palm. ‘Ah, yes … I see … what do I see?’

‘Go on, mister.’ John’s small sharp nose quivered with excitement. ‘Tell us about our Annie.’

‘I see a room …’ Laurie Yates’s voice deepened. He ran his finger round and round Annie’s palm, making her want to snatch her hand back. ‘I see a room, a big room, with polished furniture in it, a great fire in the range with flames leaping up the chimney-back.’ Laurie dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘There’s a beautiful girl
sitting
on a low chair sewing. There’s a lamp on the round table beside her, and the cloth, a
white lace
cloth, is hanging down in folds …’

‘Shut up!’ Annie forgot to use her polite company voice. ‘Stop skitting me!’ She hated him so much she could have landed out at him and knocked him flat on his back. She had told him her dream and now he was spoiling it for her. He was making fun of her, laughing at her with his head thrown back, showing his white even teeth. She loathed him so much even his teeth revolted her. Surely there were too many of them?

‘Get out, the lot of you!’ Her small face beneath the kneb of the greasy cap was pinched and plain with hurt. She whirled round on John. ‘Go through in the back and wash that mucky face. You could grow potatoes on the tidemark round your neck.’ The pain in her ear was thumping again, and when Eddie said something underneath his breath she reached out and gripped his arm. ‘What was that you said, our Eddie?’

With a jerk he was away, but by the door he turned and yelled at the top of his voice: ‘You’re a naggin’ owd witch, our Annie! That’s what I said, an’ it’s true an’ all.’

With a ringing of clog irons on the cobblestones they were gone, leaving Annie standing hands on hips, waiting for Laurie to follow them.

Instead, he walked over to the corner and picked up his bundle. ‘Is that what you always do when you’re in a paddy? Chuck people out?’He nodded towards the door. ‘And what do you do when they refuse?’ He opened the bundle and sorted through the jumble of clothes inside, bringing out a length of blue ribbon. ‘I wasn’t laughing at you, lass. They weren’t to know it was our secret.’ He dangled the ribbon in front of her. ‘And I
could
see you in a room, just like I said. Why don’t you clean yourself up a bit and tie this ribbon in your hair? I know you’ve got a bit because I can see some coming down at the back. Take that terrible cap off and let’s have a proper look at you.’

The humiliation and shame were so great Annie wanted to crawl away from him and hide her face. Instead she stepped back a pace. ‘You can put that ribbon away, Mr Laurie Yates. And I’m not dirty. I wash meself all over on a Friday, and bits of me every day. An’ I wear this cap because it sets me apart, an’ that’s the way I want it.’ The tears were running down the side of her nose, dripping from her chin. She tried to wipe them away with the back of her hand. ‘The girls round here think I’m a bit barmy because I never go down to the Mission Hall or to Chapel. But I can’t go with them when I’ve no proper clothes to wear, can I? This skirt is the one me mother was wearing right up to the day she died.’ Annie took hold of a fold of her blouse. ‘An’ this doesn’t fit me proper neither, now that me front’s got too big.’

Laurie blinked twice. The straightforward utter simplicity of this young lass had him beat. She looked so small, so vulnerable standing there, glaring at him with the tears rolling down her cheeks, he felt the faint stirrings of a compassion that hadn’t troubled him for a long, long time.

She hadn’t finished with him yet. Annie’s cry was a childish wail of anguish. ‘It’s me birthday today and nobody knows, an’ don’t you go telling anybody because if they’ve forgot they’ve forgot.’ She glanced at the table. ‘So if you’ll just go I can get on with things. It’s time I was lighting the lamp and getting the coal in. You’ll find me dad in the Ram’s Head bending his elbow; it’ll be going up and down like a pump handle.’

Laurie scratched his head, struggling to say something to help, anything to comfort and bring a smile back to the small hard face buttoned up with misery because he’d implied she wasn’t clean.

‘You got me wrong, love,’ he said at last. He backed towards the open door, anxious to be away. ‘It’s such a pity that a lovely girl like you hides herself beneath
her
dad’s old cap. There’s a raving beauty hiding away inside those clothes. I’m sure of it.’

Nodding twice, feeling he’d done his best, he walked out into the cool of the September evening, leaving behind him the bright blue ribbon looped over the back of a chair, the one splash of colour in the dingy room.

When all the boys were in bed, including Georgie who had to be up at four the next morning, Annie went into the back scullery and filled an enamel bowl with cold water. First she washed her top half with the same hard yellow soap used for scrubbing floors and clothes. Then, making sure the door was bolted, she climbed out of her long skirts and washed the lower part of her thin body. Her hair she saved till the last, rinsing it with a jug of water from the rain butt outside.

She put her mother’s old cloak over her long flannel nightdress, just in case her father and Mr Yates came in before she’d had a chance to get to bed, but for Jack Clancy to stop drinking before chucking-out time was unheard of. It was said he could sup a canal and still walk a straight line home.

All the same, she hurried with her preparations for the morning. First the fire had to be built up with slack packed tight, but not too tight to allow a tiny spurt of blue flame here and there. Then the big brown earthenware crock-pot had to be filled with the oatmeal, water and salt so that it would give a decent lining to the stomach for the breakfast porridge. Annie laid a blanket and her father’s heavy winter coat over a chair, and as she did so her fingers touched the blue ribbon. Picking it up, she let it slide through her fingers, feeling the silken slipperiness of it, holding it up to the lamp-light to admire its bright periwinkle blue.

She woke to the rhythmic thump-thump of the pit’s winding engine, rolled out of bed and dressed herself in the dark, fumbling with dead-ended fingers at tapes and buttons. She perked up slightly after splashing her
face
with cold water, and before she went through into the living-room bundled her clean-smelling hair up into the cap.

Laurie was up too, tending the fire, laying the coals on with care and holding the blower in front of it to get a good draught up the chimney. The blanket and coat were folded neatly, and there was nothing to show whether he had slept on the floor or in the rocking-chair.

Hardening herself against him, Annie decided she didn’t care one way or another. There was too much to do anyway. There were three snap tins and three bottles of water to be put up instead of two. No cold fatty bacon to lay between the thick slices of bread this morning because the money had run out, but lashings of dripping instead, seasoned with salt and spread thick.

Nobody ever spoke at that time in the morning. Jack liked his porridge as thick as a poultice, and Georgie sat huddled in his pit clothes, a small weary scarecrow, his hands cupped round a pint mug of scalding tea.

‘I hope you get taken on, Mr Yates.’ At that moment Annie was her mother again, gentle and polite, wishing her lodger well.

Laurie nodded, used by now to her rapid changes of mood and speech. A kid, play-acting, he thought, stepping out of the front door into the street to join the throng of men and boys clattering their way down to the pit.

Annie went straight back to bed, shivering in spite of her heavy serge skirt and long black woollen stockings. If they didn’t want him he’d be back within the hour, by which time she’d be up for good as today was the day she did the washing for Mr Thwaites and his three motherless children. Annie closed her eyes and tried to drift off to sleep, but it was no good. Mr Thwaites was a real tartar, examining his shirts and snapping his collars round his hand to see if they were starched stiff enough. As the pit manager he wore a suit and a bowler hat to work, and drank at nights in a different pub. He was clumsily
built
, often made uncouth gestures with his hands, and had a nose on him like a ripe tomato. Annie couldn’t take to him at all. She was always glad to be shut of the folded washing and be on her way back down the hill. For a boss he was – she tried to think of the right word – too
unpolished
. His head was too round, his light brown hair too coarse, and there were dents in his forehead as though someone had once taken a chisel to him.

The wicker basket with the Thwaites’s dirty washing was over in the corner. There was nothing to it really, she supposed, not when you compared it to pit clothes stiff with sweat and dirt. She pulled the rough blanket over her head, but it was no use, she wasn’t going to get to sleep again.

She broke off from her washing to get the four boys off to school, standing over John to see he got some porridge down him. The Thwaites’s whites were already in the copper, the dirt loosened from them after a good soak in the wooden dolly-tub. Annie had scrubbed them well first, paying special attention to Mr Thwaites’s combs and to his shirts where he sweated underneath his armpits. The things that would shrink in the boil she set to with the dolly, lifting it up and down in the soapy water so that its four legs churned the clothes round and round.

When she heard the ‘Tubs to mend’ man coming down the street she wondered for a second if he would replace the broken steel hoop on one of the washtubs, giving her till the next time he came round to pay what she owed.

‘Not him!’ she muttered fiercely, giving Mr Thwaites’s flannel nightshirt a vicious poss, swilling it so hard the water slapped over the rim of the tub on to the flagged floor.

Although the day was fine, Annie could feel dampness in the air, so she decided to dry the white things inside rather than bring them in covered in black specks. She
felt
she couldn’t face having to do them again. To turn the handle of the big mangle she stood with her feet well braced and far apart, as she fed the sheets in the wooden rollers straight into a tub of rinsing water.

When the boys came in for their dinner they sat uncomplaining in a room so full of steam the dampness ran in rivulets down the walls. Annie had no time to sit down herself. She’d put too much dolly-blue in the pillowcases and tablecloths, which meant they’d have to go through another water, at least once.

The boys were at it again. Fighting like savages, locked in hand-to-hand combat. Annie finished pouring boiling water on to the starch, stirring it to the consistency of frog spawn before separating Billie and Eddie who looked set to kill each other.

‘The strap’s behind the door if you want a proper larruping,’ she shouted, slapping the nearest pair of legs. ‘Get out of me sight, the lot of you!’

She stood at the door watching them dawdle their way up the hill, one of them holding a rag to a bleeding nose, another stuffing a torn shirt into ragged trousers. Openly defying her by sparking their clog-irons on doorsteps, knowing full well there was no money to pay old Barney the clogger to fix them back on again when they came home with them hanging loose. Billie snatched Timmy’s cap from his head and threw it into a pile of horse dirt in the middle of the street. Annie stepped quickly back into the house and closed the door.

By half-past two the actual washing was finished, so Annie upended both tubs and swept the water out of the back. Her ear still ached, and she’d got a splinter in a finger from the worn poss stick, but there was the mangle to wipe down and the copper to empty, saving a bucket of good soapy water to give the oilcloth up in the front bedroom a good going over.

Annie could still remember her mother and Georgie bringing the roll home from the market, carrying it between them like a stepladder. It wasn’t quite big
enough
, and the green and orange colours shouted at you as soon as you opened the door, but it had gone for a song because it was an off-cut, and as Annie’s mother had said, the colours would fade. You could get used to anything. ‘You could stand on your head for three days if you were forced to,’ she was fond of saying.

The fire was half-way up the chimney-back and steam rose from the washing draped over a massive clothes maiden, drying them nicely. There was the ironing still to do, but by eight o’clock that evening everything would be folded away in the big wicker basket, ready to be taken to Mr Thwaites’s red brick house overlooking the spare land at the top of the next street.

Annie hoped it would be the eldest girl who paid her. Last week the pit manager had given her a funny look and held on to her hand as he passed over one shilling and threepence, counting each coin separately, and pressing them into her palm before closing her fingers over them. He had stared at her with a blank expression on his face. As if he was going to be sick, Annie thought. As if he’d lost a tanner and found a threepenny bit.

ANNIE WAS WELL
on with the ironing when Laurie Yates came in from the mine.

‘It rains as hard down there as it does up here. Did you know that?’ He slumped down in the rocking-chair. ‘I could sleep on a clothes-line.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Your father’s down in the bottom house seeing his woman, but he’ll be back for his tea, and your Georgie’s playing football in the pit yard with some of his mates.’

‘Our dad hasn’t got a woman!’ Annie’s voice was deceptively calm. The transformation from the good
looking
, impudent young man to the exhausted figure sprawled in the chair shocked and disappointed her. In his pit dirt Laurie Yates looked like all the others; worse than most, with his white teeth flashing in his black face. She had thought he was different, with his alien way of speaking and his gentlemanly manners, but she’d been wrong. He was bending down to his boots, so tired he was fumbling with the laces. Doing it less than a foot away from the clothes maiden with Mr Thwaites’s combinations steaming in the heat from the fire.