The Travelling Man

by Marie Joseph

  ‘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.

  4

  IT WAS LATE November before Annie forced her
self 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.

  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 brou
ght 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.’