The Travelling Man (9 page)

Annie stared at the unwashed face, black with coal dust, at the pink lips, parting over small white teeth. She had been going to tell Georgie about the baby, making a
sort
of story out of it, but faced with the hard stare, so much at variance with the childish features, she knew she could never bring herself to say the words, however much she wanted to. Conditioned by her mother’s puritanical upbringing, remembering how her brothers had arrived mysteriously in the room upstairs, Annie bit her lips, chewing on them till they hurt. For all his pitman’s talk, Georgie was still a little boy; for all his pretence of not caring, his acceptance of Mrs Greenhalgh had more than a bit of bravado in it, she realised with a pang of pity.

‘I’m going away,’ she said.

The shrug of the thin shoulders could have meant anything.

‘
Georgie
? I may be gone a long time.’ She struggled to explain. ‘But Mrs Greenhalgh will look to you all. Our dad’ll see to that.’

She half stretched her hand out to the black paw emerging from her brother’s tattered jacket, but drew it back as she sensed his stiffened withdrawal. It came to her in that moment that the small boy in his filthy pitman’s working clothes was as frightened as she knew herself to be. Why hadn’t she realised before this that he was scared stiff every single day of his life? But if he hated the mine so much, why hadn’t he said so? Why didn’t he
talk
and express his feelings?

She softened her voice. ‘There are jobs going at Howard and Bulloughs if you don’t like the mine. There’s no law saying you have to work down the mine all your life. You could perhaps go to the Technical College in a few years. You were always top of the class at school, and the Co-op might pay your fees. They’re paying for Tom Carmichael across the street.’ She was trying her best. She was saying things that should have been said a long time ago. Her mother would have seen to it that Georgie’s brains weren’t wasted. She’d have sat him down and talked to him. Annie knew what store her mother had set on education. ‘Listen to me, Georgie.’

‘What’s it got to do with you what I do? You’re
going
away.’ For a moment brown eyes looked into blue. ‘Where are you going our Annie? Is it because Mrs Greenhalgh is coming to live here that you’re going away?’

The door flew open, catapulting John into the room.

‘Our Eddie’s fallen down and bumped his head on the lamp-post. He slurred right into it. Miss Morris came out to tell us to stop making a noise and she went full length on the slide we’d made. On her bum. And our Billie’s thrown a snowball at Mr Thwaites and knocked his billycock off …’

Annie snatched her shawl from the nail behind the door. When she turned round Georgie had gone.

The next week Jack Clancy and Florrie Greenhalgh were married by special certificate. In Father O’Leary’s eyes they wouldn’t be married at all, but his cough had turned into a pneumonia of the double variety and he’d been rushed by ambulance to the hospital.

When he was told the news he thanked God that poor little Annie now had a mother to see her through her trouble.

‘God moves in a mysterious way,’ was quoted as being the last thing he whispered, before crossing his chilblained hands over his chest and closing his eyes for ever.

Jack Clancy had steadfastly refused to speak to his daughter since the day he had found out about her shameful condition. There was an expression in his eyes that terrified Annie. It was as though he couldn’t bear to look at her; as though to be in the same room as her taxed his self control to the limit.

The snow had gone, leaving a grey-wet slush on the pavements, though it still sparkled white on the hump of Pendle hill and lay in uneven patches on the moors.

Now that the wedding had taken place Annie knew that her days were numbered. Her father had put it
about
that she was to go into service in a big house on the Yorkshire border, and knowing how bad the situation had been between Florrie Greenhalgh and her daughter-in-law, the story was accepted in the street as being the best solution in the circumstances.

Edith Morris knew her mother was on her last. Since Christmas she had been sleeping the hours away, eating like a bird and taking no notice of the life in the street. When Nextdoor told the old lady about Annie going away, Grandma Morris tried to bring to mind what Edith had said. Some kind of trouble … Her eyes blurred over with the effort of trying to remember, but it was no good. The worries of this world had nothing to do with Grandma Morris now. She could recall events from her far away childhood, but not what happened yesterday. Quite peacefully she slipped in and out of her dreams, going happily back to the time when she lived with her mother and father on their farm high up on Whalley Nab. She whimpered in her sleep as she relived the day when the Press Gangs came, rounding up men for the Battle of Waterloo. She could still hear their loud voices as they thrust their bayonets into the hay where her father was hiding, narrowly missing impaling him to the barn floor. She remembered the day when the cholera epidemic spread from Blackburn, claiming three of her sisters and two brothers in one dreadful month.

‘They’re sending Annie away,’ her daughter told her one day.

‘Annie would have lived if the fever had broke,’ her mother said, and Edith knew she was talking about her youngest sister, the one she suspected her mother had loved the most.

‘They’re sending young Annie Clancy away. She’s not wanted since her father got a new wife.’

Bertram Thwaites heard the women gossiping down at the mine.

‘Is what I’ve heard true?’ he asked Annie when she brought the washing back that night.

‘Is what true, Mr Thwaites?’

Disturbed by the unkempt look of her and the lingering sadness in her eyes, he curbed his normal abrupt way of speaking. ‘That you’re going away into service?’

‘It’s true.’ She was holding out her hand for the money, wanting to go, rushing away with that desperate look on her face, bundled up into old clothes like a woman of the roads. Suddenly he couldn’t accept that.

‘Do you
want
to go?’

To his surprise she gave a hard dry laugh. ‘No. I don’t want to go, Mr Thwaites, but needs must.’

‘What do you mean, needs must?’

He snatched her hand and held on to it. He was flushed in the face, as out of breath as if he’d run all the way up from the mine without stopping.

‘There are reasons I have to go away.’ Annie tried to free her hand, to pull away from him, but his grip was iron, his big red face contorted out of shape with the force of his feelings.

‘It’s because of that Greenhalgh woman, isn’t it? That son of hers finally got the courage up to give her her marching orders, and not before time. She’s vicious, that old fat slob. She’d make mincemeat out of you if you were forced to live in the same house. Oh, aye, I can see that for meself. It’s diabolical!’ he shouted, thrusting his face even closer.

Annie was horrified. The dents in his forehead were surely more pronounced than ever, and she could swear his thick neck was swelling and pulsating like a toad’s.

‘I have to go now, Mr Thwaites.’ He was sweating cobs. She felt sick. ‘Please. I’ve got a lot to do before morning. Before I leave …’

‘There’s no need for you to leave, lass.’

With a jerk he pulled her tight up against him, pressing
her
head hard against the rough serge of his jacket. He smelt of tobacco and of the pit.

‘I’ll
marry
you, Annie.’ His gruff voice spoke into the top of her head. ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for you. I’ve watched you grow up into a fine looking lass. I’ll marry you then there won’t be the need for you to go away, and that Mrs Greenhalgh can go and take a running jump at herself.’

Any minute now and he was going to kiss her. Annie clamped her mouth tight shut, clenching her teeth together. When his tongue wormed its way into her mouth she brought her knee up, fast and hard, so that he let go of her, backing away, clutching himself.

‘You young devil!’

In one bound he was on her, forcing her up against the table, bending her over, but Annie was ready for him. Her arms, grown strong with all the daily mangling, possing, the carrying of the heavy clothes-baskets, were slender ropes of steel. She was off out of the house before Bertram Thwaites had time to pull himself together. The money he owed her was there on the table, one shilling and a sixpence.

‘She can whistle for this,’ he muttered, putting it back in his pocket, before tying his muffler round his neck in a fierce knot, slamming his billycock on his head and going out the back way. To soothe his pride in four pints of ale at the Pig and Whistle.

Outside in the street, Annie leaned against the wall to get her breath back. When Mr Thwaites had come at her like that she had wanted to kill him. Remembering the sickening kiss, she took a crumpled hankie from up her sleeve and rubbed her mouth hard with it.

‘All right, Annie?’

The man from next door came slithering past her on the icy pavement on his way to the night shift at the mine.

‘You want to mind you don’t fall. They’ve been
queuing
up at the hospital all day with broken arms and legs. It’s the freezing on top of a thaw what does it.’

He had known her since she was a child. Once he had won a coconut at the fair and brought it round for her. He was a kind man with a John the Baptist face.

Annie watched him slide his way down the street. He still considered her to be a child, yet in the morning she was leaving home for good to have a baby in some unknown place by a man whose face she was beginning to forget. It was unbelievable, but true.

The doctor was going into Grandma Morris’s house. She saw Edith let him in, her long face stiff with suffering in the light of the street lamp.

Annie opened the door of her own house and saw Mrs Greenhalgh putting coal on the fire with her hands, then wiping them down an already filthy pinny.

‘Put the wood in the ’ole, chuck,’ she called out cheerfully. ‘You’d best keep the money from Mr Thwaites’s washing to pay the carrier with tomorrow. It’s like getting blood out of a stone getting money from your dad, the tight-fisted old beggar.’

She was laughing as though it was funny. The boys were sitting round the table stuffing their faces with doorsteps of bread spread with margarine and lavish sprinklings of sugar. They liked their new mother because she let them run wild, eat what they fancied, and never asked them about what had gone on at school, what Miss had said, or whether they’d washed their necks in the past week.

Not like their Annie who inspected their ears and pinned a clean rag on their jerseys when they had a cold to save them blowing their noses on their sleeves. The brown-paper chest protectors smeared with goose grease she’d insisted on them wearing were soon ripped off and flung to the back of the fire with Mrs Greenhalgh looking on and laughing. She laughed at everything; she laughed at nothing, and funniest of all, she wobbled when she laughed.

‘Are you the fattest lady in the world?’ John had asked her one day, fascinated by the sight of her getting her enormous behind stuck in his dad’s rocking-chair. ‘I expect you could be in a show with it costing a penny to go in.’

‘A penny!’ The laugh had nearly ripped the plaster off the walls. ‘More like twelve pennies to see someone my size!’

Annie need have no qualms about leaving her brothers to the slap-dash ministrations of her father’s new wife. Neglected they would certainly be, but she had a feeling they would thrive on it.

Florrie wasn’t laughing the next morning when she and Annie had the house to themselves.

She was explaining about the workhouse. ‘You have to be properly destitute to get in, so you can’t take much with you. An’ if you could faint on the doorstep you might have a better chance of being taken in.’ She reached up with her fat arms to put one of her own ornaments on the high mantelpiece. ‘It’s a pity you don’t show more, but they’ll have you examined so that’s all right. They’ll likely put you to work in the laundry, but you won’t need any training for that.’ She stood back to admire the blue glass jug flanking the clock that Annie’s mother had brought with her when she was first married. ‘The time will soon pass, then you can leave and get work outside. They can always find places for the babies born in there, especially if they’re handsome and healthy. You’ll be all right, chuck.’

Annie picked up the small bundle she’d placed on the floor behind the door. It was better this way, going without having said goodbye to the boys. They’d come home from school for their dinner caring nothing that it was bread and jam again, eating standing up if they’d a mind to, putting four spoonfuls of sugar into their cocoa if they felt like it, playing truant if they thought they could get away with it, all her good bringing up forgotten.

She looked round the room, a bare room but for the essentials, but cosy with the firelight washing the walls to a soft shade of apricot.

‘I’ll be off then,’ she said.

Florrie had a sudden urge to go to Annie, take her hand and bring her back into the warm. In her mother’s old cloak, with a scarf tied round the flat cap, the child looked like a tramp – like an old, old woman of the roads.

‘It’s for the best, chuck,’ she said, trying to convince herself. ‘Things allus turn out for the best.’ She crossed herself quickly. ‘Some things are meant to be …’

Annie opened the door and walked out.

IT DIDN’T REGISTER
with Annie that the blind had been pulled down over Grandma Morris’s window until she was in the carrier’s cart on the road away from the town.

Did it mean the old woman had died? Was that why Edith’s face had looked even more mournful than usual as she let the doctor into the house the night before? Annie swayed from side to side with the movement of the cart, huddled into her mother’s old cloak, the flat cap pulled low over her forehead, too cold and miserable to make herself care much one way or the other. No, that wasn’t true. Grandma Morris was a saint – even if you couldn’t blow your nose without her knowing about it. Annie wished she’d called in to say goodbye; wished she hadn’t been too ashamed to tell them why she was going away. Grandma Morris would have felt nothing but pity, whereas Edith … Annie shook her head. Edith would be disgusted.