The Travelling Man (6 page)

‘Laurie?’ She was waiting, gazing at him, her eyes limpid with the trust she had in him. ‘Will we be married soon?’

If she didn’t get up from where she was kneeling the boys would be in from school. Or her father would walk in.

Laurie spoke quickly: ‘Of course we’ll be married, love. But first I have to go away.’

‘You can’t! Not now. Not after …’ She looked away, too shy, he guessed, to meet his eyes.

‘Listen, love.’ Keeping one eye on the door Laurie gently raised her up, guiding her towards one of the stand-chairs round the table. Pushing the work-basket towards her before going back to his place by the fire. ‘I’m never going down that mine shaft again. It’s how I imagine hell will be, but worse, because down there is hell on earth.’ He sat forward, feeling better now that he’d got her sitting away from him, even though her face was as white as bleached cotton.

‘But what we … what we just did?’ Her voice faltered. ‘That means we belong. Only night women an’ …’

‘Mrs Greenhalgh?’ he prompted, hoping to get a smile out of her.

‘You can’t leave me now,’ she said, hysteria thick in her throat. ‘What if …?’ Terror stared from her eyes, choked her voice.

‘What if you have a baby?’ Laurie said it straight out. It was the first thing they all said, the girls like Annie, the inexperienced, the first-timers. From where he sat he willed her to take a hold of herself. ‘You won’t have a baby,’ he told her firmly. ‘I made sure of that.’

She had no idea what he meant but it was what she wanted to hear so she believed him. The terror faded from her eyes.

‘If you got me into trouble, our dad would kill me first then you next.’ She came over to him, lifted his hand and gently kissed it.

‘Your dad will come in and catch you if you don’t look sharp.’ His mind was working overtime. The quivering girl must be calmed down. Fast. ‘I’ll come back. I promise.’

‘When?’ She was clinging to him like a bloody limpet.

‘A year from now. Less than a year. On your birthday. Exactly to the day I came here. I’ll save every penny, then I’ll come back for you.’

‘And we’ll be married?’

‘We’ll be married, sweetheart.’

He tried to put her from him, but she wasn’t ready.

‘Let’s say it together, Laurie. Like we were standing together in church.’

‘I promise to marry you,’ he said through clenched teeth.

‘I promise to make you a good wife,’ Annie whispered, feeling her heart contract with love. ‘For ever and ever, Amen. An’ you’ll come back for me?’

‘I’ll come back for you. I promise.’ The school must have loosed. Laurie could hear the clatter of clogs in the street outside. ‘Amen,’ he said with fervour. ‘In the sight of God,’ he added. For good measure.

‘An’ you won’t forget me?’

‘I’ll
never
forget one single word we’ve said.’

Firmly he put her from him.

As soon as her father and George had gone off to work the next morning Annie packed a hunk of bread and a nice thick slice of potted meat for Laurie to take with him.

‘To put you on,’ she told him, ‘till you get well on your way.’ She added an apple, first wiping it carefully
down
the front of her blouse. ‘Your clean socks are in your sack, and a starched white collar. In case you have to go in front of an interviewing body to get taken on.’

She was behaving like a wife already. So trusting, so naîve, so young, Laurie couldn’t get out and away quick enough. He was inordinately relieved when Timmy came downstairs complaining of the toothache, crouching down between them on the rug, holding a rag to the fire then pressing it against his cheek. Eyeing them up, taking all in.

‘Will you write to me often?’ Annie stood on the step with the door closed behind her, dry-eyed and outwardly composed.

‘Better not, love. Your dad would be bound to find out, then there’d be hell to pay.’ He risked touching her cheek, only to find his hand caught as she turned her lips to kiss his fingers. ‘I won’t be responsible for him hitting you.’

‘He will never hit me again, Laurie.’ Her eyes were very bright. ‘Now that I have you loving me, there’s no need for me to keep on trying to make
him
love me. I’m not afraid of him now, so write to me when you can. There’s nothing he can do to hurt me now.’

Laurie touched a finger to his forehead, turned and walked away, leaving her standing there sending up a silent prayer that God would keep him safe and bring him back to her. He remembered to stop at the bottom of the sloping street to turn and wave.

Annie went inside, heart bursting with love, to minister to Timmy’s tooth by pressing a piece of cotton soaked in oil of cloves against it.

Grandma Morris from two doors down had had a bad night, but at first light when Laurie Yates went past her window she was sitting up in bed with a pillow underneath her knees to ease the grinding pain.

‘Yon lodger’s just got on his way,’ she told her daughter. Edith was running about like a scalded cat getting her
mother
settled and spotless before she went off to work. ‘He’s a fine looking man.’

Edith didn’t hold with men and never had. Her mother had stopped wishing she would find someone to marry a long time ago. Always wanting to best men, take them down a peg, that was Edith. Look at her now, getting a dish of cowheels into the side oven and shoving the nigget into place so it would cook slow, when all the time her mother would have made do with a bowl of the leek and potato soup Edith had made last night.

‘The Clancys’ lodger?’ Edith sniffed. ‘I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole.’

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ her mother thought, with uncharacteristic bile.

‘There’s an understanding between us,’ Annie confided when she came round to collect the Morris’s washing, already folded and graded into whites and coloureds by Edith. ‘It’s a secret, a deadly secret, but by this time next year I could be married. Laurie is going to sea to save as much money as he can then he’s coming back for me.’

‘Very nice too,’ the old lady said, not believing a word of it. ‘He’s a fine looking man, love.’ Well, that was true enough, she thought, though his complexion was so swarthy you could be forgiven for thinking he had a touch of the tar brush in him.

Not that she would use such a phrase to her daughter. Edith had once wanted to be a missionary going out to Africa to bring the word of Jesus to the black children. Edith never noticed the colour of a person’s skin. It was their souls that mattered.

‘I’ve never seen a black man,’ Grandma Morris had told her daughter once. ‘And neither have you.’

But Edith had ignored her. The opportunity of being a missionary had long since come and gone. Now, with her mother totally bedfast Edith didn’t even have the chance
to
work full-time at weaving. The days were too long for her mother to be left alone, even though the neighbours were goodness itself. So for the past five years Edith had been a ‘sick’ worker, standing in for absentee weavers, waiting outside the mills some mornings for over an hour on the off-chance somebody failed to turn up. The old lady sighed. Being a burden was bad enough, but knowing you were one was worse.

‘It looks like our Edith has got taken on this morning, else she’d be back by now.’

It was Annie’s turn to ignore her now. She was standing there at the foot of the bed staring at the wall as if she’d seen a vision.

‘Laurie has Romany blood in him. He could tell fortunes.
You
liked him, didn’t you?’

‘He was a right bobby-dazzler, love, and educated too. I asked him why he hadn’t settled down to a proper job, but he only laughed at me.’

‘He has to feel
free
!’ Annie’s face was transformed by her love. Laurie had been gone for two hours now and the need to talk about him was overwhelming. ‘He hated the mine. The dark and the heat hurt him here.’ She thumped her chest. ‘His father wanted him to go to college but it would have finished him off. He has to be able to open a door and walk away when the feeling of being stifled comes on. Nobody can tie him down. Nobody!’

‘And he’s coming back to marry you, love?’

With a little rush Annie moved round to the side of the bed, sitting down on the counterpane and lowering her voice to a dramatic whisper.

‘We are already married, Grandma Morris. In our hearts. We love each other so much we made our vows, just as if we were in church. Promising to love each other for ever and ever, Amen. Oh yes, Laurie will be back for me.’

She went through and got the heavy basket of washing from the back, walking as if there was air beneath her
feet
and not the oilcloth scrubbed by Edith every Friday night. Poor Edith, she was thinking, to be fifty and never known what it was to have been loved by a man. No wonder she was as sour as unsweetened rhubarb.

Annie often left the front door wide open to the street while she did the ironing. Her mother had always stood on a cushion to save her feet from aching, so she stood on one too. She pressed a traycloth carefully on the right side then turned it over and ironed the wrong to bring up the lumpy splendour of Edith Morris’s French knots. Tears came to her eyes as she thought about Laurie going further away from her with every hour that passed. He was making for Bury first, he’d told her, because he had a friend there who would give him a bed for the night. Annie rolled up her sleeves to well above the elbow and fastened her hair back with Laurie’s blue ribbon. Then reached for a pillowcase fringed with Edith’s exquisite crochet-work.

On his way home Bertram Thwaites stopped to catch his breath and saw Annie at the table ironing.

‘There’s a bit of a nip in the air today, Annie.’ He took a step inside. ‘Nights’ll be drawing in soon.’ He took off his billycock and wiped his bulging forehead with the back of his jacket sleeve. Drawing attention to the dents.

‘I reckon he fell on a pitchfork once,’ Annie had told her friend Janie Whittaker at school, and they’d giggled so much the teacher had sent them both from the classroom.

‘Yes, Mr Thwaites. Winter’ll be here before we can turn round.’ Annie wished he would go away. He made her feel uncomfortable somehow. He had pale eyes that stood out like chapel hat-pegs, and a neck that rested on the rim of his high collar. Since his wife had died of double pneumonia it was said he was looking for a new wife to bring up his children, but Annie couldn’t
imagine
anyone applying for the job. Not unless they were really hard up and none too fussy.

‘You’re making a good job of the ironing, lass.’

He was staring at her bare arms, making her wish she had kept her sleeves buttoned at the wrists. She folded the pillowcase neatly into the shape Edith Morris liked for putting away in a drawer, and looked up to see the thick-set man still staring at her.

‘You’ll be up tonight to pick the washing up?’ he asked, never taking his eyes off her.

Then, much to Annie’s relief, he smoothed back his light brown hair and replaced his hat. Perhaps he’d go now, and good riddance, she told herself, remembering how Janie had decided that his hair must have come off a coconut, it was that coarse and sparse.

‘About eight o’clock, Mr Thwaites. If that’s all right with you.’

‘I’ll have the brass ready, lass.’

She nodded and started on a table-runner worked in cross-stitched daisies at the ends. Tomorrow she’d be washing Mr Thwaites’s yellow combs and ironing his shirts, dipping his collars into the bowl of starch and doing his socks by hand, being careful not to shrink them.

The iron was cooling so she changed its solder for the one heating up in the fire, taking it out with the tongs, dropping it into the iron and closing the shutter with a loud thud. Whoever was hard up enough to marry Mr Thwaites would have to take on his washing, yellowed combs and all. Annie spat on the base of the iron and tried it out first on one of Edith Morris’s dusters.

When that too grew cool she pulled the blue ribbon from her hair and pressed it carefully. Bringing it up like new.

IT WAS LATE
November before Annie forced herself to admit that she was in a trouble so terrible the mere thinking of it almost stopped her heart.

Lying in her narrow bed in the back room cluttered with washing tackle – dolly-tubs, mangle, copper, posser, rubbing-board, wicker clothes-baskets – she let the living nightmare take over. It squeezed the breath out of her; it brought her out in a cold sweat.

Laurie had taken her face between his hands and reassured her that nothing could go wrong. He said he had made sure of that. Annie brought an arm up across her eyes. How had he made sure? She groaned – a piteous little sound. Her old school friend, Janie Whittaker, had got married a year ago and told Annie that there wouldn’t be any babies for a long time yet, not with her and Jake wanting to get a few bits of furniture together first. Jake was ‘being careful,’ she said.

How careful? In what way careful?

Annie called in at Janie’s mother’s house on her way back from delivering a load of washing. Mrs Whittaker wouldn’t let her daughter or her new son-in-law lift a finger between them when they came in from standing in the mill all day. She was there at the table, having a good knead-up with her strong hands. Flour on her nose, happiness shining out of her now her future was secure with a married daughter living at home, just as if she’d never left. Things were going to go on just the same, she was sure of it.

Mrs Whittaker thought Annie looked a bit off. It was a pity her hair was so red, it drained what colour there
was
from her cheeks, and made her freckles stand out like brown measles. She had quite a nice bust on her, though her blouse needed the buttons letting out. Her mother would have made her a new one in no time, having served her time to millinery and dressmaking. Little Mrs Clancy had been a lovely woman, with time for everybody. Thought she was a cut above in some ways, but then Mrs Whittaker had heard she’d come from a quite well-to-do family in Manchester. Big Methodists, from what she’d been told. How she’d ever come to marry Jack Clancy was a mystery. She’d never turned Catholic for him, though. Mrs Whittaker couldn’t stand the sight of him, always giving women the glad eye, even when his wife was expecting.
Especially
when she was expecting, poor soul.