The Travelling Man (7 page)

Annie went after about twenty minutes. She was never going to get a word on her own with Janie, not with Janie’s mother standing there with both ears wagging.

She was passing the house with sixteen children just as the father came out.

‘Nasty neet, Annie.’

‘It is that, Mr O’Mara.’

Annie watched him cross the street swinging his arms like a soldier on parade. She turned the corner, averting her eyes from Mrs Greenhalgh’s house. It was all very strange. What was Janie’s husband doing right that Mr O’Mara was doing wrong? Was it because the O’Maras were Catholics, while Janie’s husband was Chapel? Had Laurie been a Catholic?

Annie slowed her steps. There was so much about Laurie she didn’t know. Not a word had come from him since the bright morning he’d walked away from her with his sack across his shoulder. But he’d write to her. The minute he’d found a ship. She was sure of it.

The blind was down in Grandma Morris’s house. Annie guessed that the old lady would be dozing with Edith sitting by the fire busy with her embroidery. Annie knew
she
would be welcome if she popped in for a minute, but how could she sit there chatting when her mind was so filled with worry it felt as if maggots had taken over her brain. Besides, they were such good people, Edith and her mother. Annie didn’t suppose Edith had put a foot wrong in the whole of her life. Lately the entire world seemed to be full of good people who never thought of sinning – people who would be shocked to the very depths of their souls when they found out that Annie Clancy had let the lodger have his way with her.

She stood for a moment on the flags outside the window. A warm yellow light shone out through the blind. The desire to knock on the door and go inside was an ache inside her. Edith mopped the window bottom every day, and as Annie drew a finger along the neat yellow-stone edging, an idea suddenly occurred to her.

Edith bought
Home Companion
every week and sometimes passed it on to Annie to read. Towards the end of the magazine there were letters from girls at the end of their tethers, asking the editor for advice on how to solve their problems. Annie moved on, trailing the empty wicker clothes-basket behind her. That’s what she would do. She’d write a letter, signing herself ‘Worried Blue Eyes’ and wait to see what the answer would be. Whatever was printed she would act upon. She would … she would do whatever the editor thought best.

She stopped with one hand on the sneck of her own door. About three weeks back a young lady had been strongly advised to resist her fiancé’s caresses, remaining pure till their wedding in two years’ time. Making love out of wedlock, the editor had said sternly, was considered by all right-thinking people to be both vulgar and unfortunate.

That editor would likely tear Annie’s letter up and drop it straight into the waste-paper basket. A girl making love with the lodger, still in his pit dirt. The editor would be sick at the mere idea of it.

The maggots were nibbling away at her brain again.
She
could feel her breasts tingling; she could feel them growing bigger. ‘Oh, dear God, help me now,’ she whimpered. ‘I am asking You from my heart. Please,
please
, help me now. I ask you from my very soul to make things come all right.’

She opened the door and saw Eddie sitting on John’s head, while the two other boys fought to the death over a large glass marble.

And knew in that moment that nothing and nobody could help her now.

One morning, just after Christmas, in the hour before the boys were up, Annie made up her mind to kill herself.

There was no choice.

She crouched over the fire coaxing it to a good blaze so that she could carry a shovelful of coal through to heat the water already in the copper. But when she got it there the iron door was sticking so that, in struggling to open it, she almost dropped her fiery burden on to her feet.

She knew she was going to be sick again, heaving and retching over the slopstone with nothing to get rid of by now but a thin white froth. Silently she rocked herself backwards and forwards, her face pinched with anguish. It wouldn’t be long before her father cottoned on to what was wrong with her and when he did … when he did she was
dead
. It wouldn’t be any use trying to tell him that Laurie had promised to marry her, that they were already married in the sight of God.

Annie straightened up from the slopstone, turned on the tap and as she did so it was as though the maggots in her head swelled so much they threatened to burst her head open, like a ripe pomegranate.

She ran outside into the yard and when she banged her head against the blackened wall she felt no pain at first. It was only when she went back inside that she felt a trickle of blood down her face.

‘There’s something sadly wrong with young Annie.’

Edith Morris was checking over the week’s washing before storing it away in lavender-scented drawers.

‘She’s not herself,’ she told her mother. ‘She just took the money tonight and went.’

‘I’d just nodded off,’ the old lady said. ‘She wouldn’t want to wake me, and you were busy making the cocoa.’ She stretched out her hand for a cup. ‘Young Annie’s not been right since that lodger of theirs went away. She talked daft to me about him coming back to marry her.’

‘You never said.’

‘It was private.’

‘Well, why are you telling me now?’

They stared at each other over the rims of their cocoa cups. Both of them doing rapid sums in their heads.

‘She’s put a bit of weight on,’ Edith said.

‘She’s no fatter in the face.’

‘No, not in the
face
.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Grandma Morris said in her head. Not aloud because Edith would have accused her of blaspheming.

Annie had taken to wearing the flat cap again, bundling her hair up into it, not caring a toss how she looked.

Early January brought a frost so hard that she brought the sheets and towels in off the line as stiff as planks. Even a handful of salt in the rinsing water, supposed to stop them freezing, had no effect.

By now the waist-band on her skirt was a long way off meeting, so she used a big nappy pin she found in a drawer, and wore her small shawl tied loosely. She had stopped praying to God to make things right, and she no longer thought up ways of killing herself. The frantic never-ending worry had taken her strength, sapped her spirit, and the only way she could get through the days was to divide them into hours, living each one from one dragging minute to the next.

She stood at the mangle, feet well apart, purposefully feeding treble thickness sheets through the wooden rollers, straining at the big iron wheel till every muscle in her body ached. But nothing happened. She forced herself to jump from halfway up the stairs, landing heavily, and she worked at her wash-tubs with the posser till the sweat stood out on her forehead.

It was strange how the mind worked, she told herself, remembering how her mother had done all these things. ‘My poor, poor little mother …’ Annie conjured her up, small and gentle, and remembered that in that gentleness lay a lot of strength. She would have known what to do. Somehow they would have faced up to this terrible, unbelievable thing together.

‘Help me, Mam …’ Annie closed her eyes and put her hands together. ‘Tell me what to do. Send me a sign showing me what to do.’

When the knock came at the door she jumped. When she opened the door and saw the priest standing there she knew her prayer had been answered so promptly she could only gape in wonder, holding out both hands as if to warm them at a glowing fire.

‘Father!’ She drew the priest inside, pulled the rocking-chair closer to the fender, pushed the kettle over the coals.

‘You’ll have a pot of tea, Father? It’s blowing outside fit to whip your tonsils out. The wind’s been whacking at the windows all night.’ She moved an outsized clothes maiden festooned with steaming undergarments away from the fire. ‘I bet it snows when the wind drops. I bet it does.’

Father O’Leary unfastened his long black cloak and draped it over the back of a stand-chair. Annie’s mother had had her roots deep in Methodism but she had always made him welcome, listened to him gravely, then sent him on his way feeling that somehow she had been too clever for him. Her husband now … well, Jack Clancy was another matter.

‘No good coming here for a hand-out, Father,’ he’d say. ‘And no good trying to persuade me to come to Confession. I’d keep you too long. There’s not much short of murder that I haven’t done!’

Putting his fingers together like the steeple of a church, the old man smiled on Annie.

‘A warm drink wouldn’t come amiss, and by the look of you, my child, you’ll be glad of one yourself.’

He was taken aback when Annie suddenly dropped to her knees by his chair. ‘You’ve come in answer to a prayer, Father.’

‘Indeed, my child?’

What a pathetic sight she was in that man’s cap, bundled up in clothes not fit for the rag bag.

‘Take your time, Annie,’ he said, removing his glasses which had steamed up and no wonder with the room like a Turkish bath.

‘I don’t know how to say it, Father.’ She had her head down, speaking so quietly he couldn’t hear a word she said.

‘Speak up, child. There’s nothing so bad that a good confession can’t put right.’

‘I didn’t know what I was doing, Father …’

‘I’m listening. Take a deep breath, and take your time.’

‘There was a man, Father.’

The priest drew in a deep breath. Surely …? Oh, no! He had often grieved for the life this young girl led since her mother’s untimely end. It was all wrong that young Annie Clancy should be bringing up a family of boys, taking in washing to keep them fed. Never leaving the house as far as he knew except to lug a heavy clothes basket round the streets. And look at her … just look at her … He shook his head. For a minute he’d thought the worst.

‘This man. Did he say something to frighten you, my child?’

Annie’s head drooped even lower. ‘He came as a
lodger
, Father, back last September. Our dad told him he could stop here. He was a sailor.’

Light was beginning to dawn. ‘And now he’s sailed away on a troop ship?’

‘No! He doesn’t … he didn’t work that kind of ship.’ Her voice was ragged with shame. ‘I’m going to have a baby! An’ nothing will shift it. Nothing!’

Father O’Leary closed his eyes, but not in prayer. What he was thinking at that moment wasn’t fit for anybody’s ears, let alone God’s. The blind panic in Annie’s eyes shocked him into an anger so great he could feel himself beginning to tremble with the force of it.

‘To even
think
of trying to get rid of a baby is a mortal sin, child,’ he said automatically, in the instant before his natural compassion took over. ‘Are you
sure
?’ His mind groped for an explanation. ‘You can’t have a baby with just kissing a man, Annie.’ He put the glasses on again and coughed. ‘Did your mother not talk to you before she … before she died?’

‘I did more than kissing, Father.’

Annie stood up, and as she did so the shawl dropped away. The kettle came to a spluttering boil and she leaned over to lift it from the trivet.

It was true … Father O’Leary glimpsed the thickening of her normally slender waist, saw the big safety-pin bridging the placket of the brown skirt. He covered his eyes with a hand at the terrible pity of it.

‘Have you seen the doctor, child?’

‘Oh, no! Don’t tell me to see the doctor, Father. The last time we had him was when our Eddie had rheumatic fever bad, an’ it took more than a year to pay him off.’ Tears spilled from her eyes. ‘I don’t need no doctor. I just need to be told what to do. I don’t
know
what to do. I ask meself every minute what to do …’

‘Kneel down, child.’

Over the bowed head and shaking shoulders, over the sounds of her sobbing, the priest said a prayer. It was a prayer vague in content, asking for forgiveness
for
Annie’s sins, unproductive even to the old man’s own ears.

‘You must hand over your worry to God. He alone can show you the way,’ he finished, then reached for his cloak. ‘In the meantime there must be some woman, some
good
woman you can talk to …’ His voice tailed away. He should have been prepared for what this child had been trying to tell him – it was a confession he’d listened to often enough, but she had knocked him for six. He turned at the door. For a man to take advantage of young Annie Clancy, little scarecrow that she was in her bunchy ragged clothes, was an obscenity. It was a spitting on the face of God.

‘No, don’t go doing anything foolish. Will you promise me that?’

Annie bowed her head. A dreadful certainty was dawning on her. Father O’Leary hadn’t known what to do, either. She’d embarrassed him by what she’d told him. He hadn’t been able to get out of the house quick enough. His face was as red as if he’d had it boiled up in a pudding cloth.

Automatically, with a quiet desperation, she reversed a vest and a pair of bloomers on the clothes maiden. Giving their other sides a chance to dry.

It was an almost primeval rage that had flushed Father O’Leary’s face to scarlet. He was known in that part of Lancashire as a man of God, with a wealth of charity and forgiveness in him, a priest first but a man a close second. In his young days, before he left Ireland, he had worked on and off as a fairground boxer, taking on anyone for the price of a meal and a pint of good milk stout. He’d had it in him to turn professional, they’d said, and that might have been if he hadn’t killed a man one day, felling him with a single blow to the head.

It was not his fault. The man could have died at any given minute from a clot of blood just waiting to be dislodged. It was all part of the game, they said. And
let
him bear in mind that when he turned professional things would be more ordered, with doctors examining a man before he stepped into the ring. He was a potential champion, they swore. Altogether in the world light-heavyweight class.

Father O’Leary walked slowly down the sloping street, clenching and unclenching his hands, feeling that same strength in them from so long ago. From that time to this he had never once lifted a hand in anger, but this day … He stopped and stared down at his hands, balling them into fists.