The Travelling Man

by Marie Joseph

‘Exactly.’ Nellie nodded her small head up and down three times. ‘Exactly.’

  Biddy put a hand to her mouth. ‘You mean she … they …?’

  Nellie put up a hand. ‘We don’t talk about things like that. Especially at the table. Suffice to say that after that night Annie had no choice left to her but to leave in disgrace.’

  ‘You mean she seduced him?’ Biddy could hardly bear the excitement. ‘An’ he spurned her so that to save her face she had to go?’ Her eyes were as round as pinwheels. ‘An’ all the time he thinks it was his fault and he’s no better than one of the animals he tends. An’ why he’s so bad-tempered and why he doesn’t go to Manchester any more to see his fancy piece?’

  ‘That will do! I’ve got my palpitations coming on again, and is it any wonder?’ Nellie got up and held a hand to her fat bosom. ‘I think I’ll go for a lie down.’

  Biddy went straight into the room at the end of the long hall. She couldn’t get over it. Annie and Mr Armstrong, slaking their passion on the horse-hair sofa … She sat down and stroked its shiny prickly surface. The thought was so beautiful she could hardly bear it. She rocked herself to and fro, imagining …

  Seth, from force of habit, made straight for the fire when he came in and the face Biddy turned to him was so vacant, so filled with longing, he asked her if she felt ill. If she did, then of course she must go up to her room until she felt better.

  Biddy found it hard to close her mouth. How handsome he was. How romantic his profile. What a beautiful couple he and Annie would make. She slid from the sofa and backed towards the door.

  ‘Mrs Martindale and me were talking about Annie Clancy earlier on,’ she said, watching his face for the slightest hint of emotion. ‘Mrs Martindale says Annie never went home.’

  He turned away so fast Biddy could only guess his expression.

  ‘And does Mrs Martindale know where she is now?’

  Surely his voice shook? Biddy felt a prickle up her spine. ‘She says not, sir.’ She slipped round the door. ‘I’m very sorry, sir.’

  Seth stared hard at the door after Biddy had closed it behind her, then wrenched it open, calling down the hall in a voice that had Biddy all of a tremble.

  ‘Mrs Martindale! Will you come here, please?’

  In the kitchen Biddy clasped her hands together across her disappointingly flat chest. He was fired with thwarted passion – it was there, in his whole manner. Mrs Martindale did know where Annie was. Biddy hadn’t been born yesterday. Nor the day before that, neither. The old bag knew something she was keeping to herself.

  ‘Annie Clancy!’ Seth went straight into the attack. ‘Why didn’t you tell me where she is?’

  Nellie turned her head towards the door as if she sensed someone listening outside. ‘Who said …’ Her eyes were wary. ‘I never …’

  ‘I’ve found out exactly where she is!’ Seth lied, his voice entirely devoid of emotion. ‘All I want to know is if she’s happy there?’

  ‘She’s all right, sir.’

  ‘You’ve heard from her?’ Seth sat down at his desk, picked up a paper-weight and held it lightly in one hand. ‘Is she well?’

  Nellie swallowed. ‘Quite well, sir.’

  ‘Kind to her, are they?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir.’ The soft rhythm of the conversation had Nellie bemused. ‘Lily Eccles is a second cousin of mine. She …’

  The desk chair was sent spinning as Seth sprang to his feet. ‘Lily Eccles? Barney Eccles’s wife?’

  Too late Nellie realised she’d been taken in. Mr Armstrong hadn’t known where Annie was, and now he looked ready to throw the glass paper-weight at her. She clenched her hands, turned and walked with controlled dignity out into the hall.

  Seth started after her, then stopped. He had to get a hold of himself first before he shook her or slapped her thin sallow face. Barney Eccles! A sharp pain stabbed at the side of his head. There wasn’t a woman this side of fifty safe from the hill farmer’s groping, filthy hands. Sitting down again at his desk he buried his head in his hands.

  And he’d been there! Back in April. He had stood with Barney in that filthy yard, itching to get away once he’d seen to the cow. And all the time Annie was there, somewhere in the house, or out in the fields. Living with that awful woman and her sticky brood.

  He remembered too the inexplicable ache of sadness as he’d ridden away. As though he was being called back.

  Suddenly he hurled the paper-weight at the stone fireplace, striding from the room as it splintered into tiny pieces.

  ‘What have you been saying to Mr Armstrong?’ Nellie Martindale was breathing as fast as if she’d run a mile.

  Biddy feigned total amazement. ‘Me? Mr Armstrong?’ She opened her eyes wide at the housekeeper, who looked as white as a sheet. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  Whatever Mrs Martindale had been going to say was left unsaid as the kitchen door slammed back so hard that little flakes of plaster dropped from the ceiling.

  ‘At first light,’ the vet shouted, looking like the wrath of God, ‘I am going to ride over to the Eccles’s farm and bring Annie back with me. When I arrive I expect to find you gone, Mrs Martindale. Out of my sight, out of this house. Do you understand?’ With that he turned on his heel and made for the door.

  Biddy gasped at the sight of the prim and proper Mrs Martindale rushing after her employer, yelling like a common fishwife.

  ‘It was you what upset Annie Clancy. You what made her run upstairs and bolt her door against you! You think you can put the blame on me, but you can’t! I was listening.’ She followed him right out into the hall. ‘It was to protect her from you that I sent her away!’

  With every shouted word her voice rose higher and higher. Biddy felt she would die with the thrill of the drama enfolding before her eyes. A real drama this time.

  ‘You mustn’t upset yourself, Mrs Martindale,’ she said insincerely, as the housekeeper staggered back into the kitchen, clutching her heart.

  She wasn’t even heard.

  ‘You’ve been nothing but trouble since you first came to this house! You’re a lazy, stupid, wicked girl. I hope you’re satisfied with what you’ve done.’

  The first slap rocked Biddy’s head back on her shoulders, the second knocked her off her feet. The carving knife was on the table. Biddy scrambled to her feet. She wouldn’t put anything past the crazed woman with the staring eyes and the bun of hair coming undone. But the housekeeper was wailing, her mouth wide open, all control gone.

  ‘He doesn’t mean it, Mrs Martindale,’ Biddy said, accepting that this time her imagination had perhaps exceeded even its own brief. ‘When he comes back with Annie things will settle down and be just the same.’

  But things would never be the same, and Biddy knew it. She got behind the table, putting its width between her and the housekeeper. The anger was draining from the thin pointed face, leaving in its place a terrible, unacceptable despair.

  Lily Eccles would never to her dying day forget the sight of the vet striding into the house and demanding to see Barney. Lily had always known that Seth Armstrong was a big man, but at that moment he looked at least seven feet tall.

  ‘Where’s Annie?’ He strode to the foot of the stairs and shouted: ‘Annie Clancy?’

  The three kids playing with a half-chewed mouse on the dirty floor were open-mouthed, round-eyed with astonishment. Not frightened, never that. How could they be when loud yelling voices had filled their days since they were born.

  ‘Annie’s gone,’ Lily told him. ‘She run off a while back.’ Her eyes turned sly. ‘Barney tried his old tricks on her and she was off like a skelped rabbit.’

  ‘Where to?’ The unwashed pots on the table jumped in the air as he brought the flat of his hand down hard. ‘Tell me where she’s gone.’

  ‘How should I know?’ Lily had found a place underneath her right armpit in urgent need of a scratch. ‘That’s Barney just passed the window. Ask him where she’s gone.’

  Lily though
t about it afterwards. She didn’t exactly want Mr Armstrong to kill her husband, but when Barney was lifted clean off his feet and held dangling there for a minute before being on the receiving end of a blow that sent him flying across the room, to land up sliding down the wall with blood streaming from his nose, she supposed she had quite enjoyed it. It got better, too, as the vet yanked her husband to his feet, frogmarched him out of the door, across the yard to the pump where he worked the handle so violently that within seconds Barney was soaking wet, gasping for breath.

  Then he leapt astride that great black horse of his and galloped off, going faster, Lily was sure, than the wind itself.

  When Barney crept into the house, dripping water, slinking upstairs like a whipped dog, Lily was hard put to it not to laugh.

  But thought better of it.

  Biddy wasn’t in the least surprised when Mr Armstrong came back without Annie and shut himself in his den, not going to bed at all that night.

  She was surprised when he told Mrs Martindale the next day that she could stay until she found another place, just as long as she kept out of his way. The animal doctor might have a temper on him as bad as old Nick’s, but he would never throw an old woman out on her heels. Biddy told herself she should have known that.

  But Nellie Martindale couldn’t accept those conditions. For her master to treat her with coldness would have destroyed her slowly, piece by piece. So when her sister in Padiham had a stroke and sent word that she was having a job to manage, Nellie took it as a sign from above, packed her things and was gone within the week.

  Leaving Biddy to muddle through as best she could.

  10

  ON A WARM muggy day Mick Malone was called in to repair the lean-to coal shed at the back of the Clancys’ house. After the job was done he stood on the pavement talking to his distant cousin, the second Mrs Clancy, Florrie Greenhalgh that was.

  ‘There’s a long-nosed woman two doors down sweeping her flags. Haven’t I seen her carrying the banner on last week’s Band of Hope march?’

  ‘More than likely,’ Florrie said. Her plump arms were folded across the front of a none too clean apron. Now and again as they talked, she moved aside to let a boy with ragged trousers and uncombed hair slip past her into the street. ‘That’s Edith Morris.’ She tapped the side of her head. ‘Daft as that brush she’s sweeping up with. She was going to be a missionary looking for heathens to pray over. Now she’s set on finding young Annie, the silly beggar.’

  ‘Young Annie? Annie Clancy?’ Mick’s tangled eyebrows merged together as he frowned with the intensity of his struggle to think coherently. ‘She got herself into trouble and ran off, didn’t she?’

  Florrie waited until Edith had gone inside and closed her front door. ‘Young Annie was given her marching orders by her father. He couldn’t stand the sight of her – used to break out in a sweat when she came in the room, especially after he found out she was expecting.’ She lifted a pendulous breast to ease herself. ‘He won’t have her name mentioned now.’

  ‘A hard man, Florrie. How did you come to marry a man like that?’

  ‘I could’ve done a lot worse for meself, Mick. Though there’s not many men who would send their only daughter to the workhouse. Poor little lass.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be off,’ Mick said, doing a little sideways shuffle before moving off down the street. ‘Tara, Florrie.’

  Thinking always bothered Mick. He avoided doing it as much as possible, but mention of the workhouse never failed to upset him. He could bring tears to his eyes just with thinking about it.

  It wasn’t until he was sitting with a second pint of ale in front of him, the first pint nicely settled in his stomach, that he allowed his memories to come creeping back.

  ‘Aw right, Mick?’ An old crone sitting in a corner wearing a man’s cap skewered to her head with hat-pins, shouted across to him.

  ‘Fair to middlin’,’ Mick said back.

  ‘Coming o’er here?’ She patted the seat beside her.

  Mick shook his head.

  ‘Suit yoursen’,’ she said.

  Mick gloomed at the stippled wall in front of him. It was no wonder that even a mention of the workhouse depressed him. His father had brought Mick and his brother over from County Cork, only to break both his legs during his first week’s work as a carter for a brewery firm. The firm said it was his own fault, that he hadn’t handled his horses properly, so he got no compensation, and within a month he was dead.

  Mick took a reflective sip of his ale. His mother had worked and slaved to keep them out of the workhouse, going out cleaning, taking in washing – anything. They moved from the two-up two-down house they were renting to a single room infested with cockroaches. Mick could remember his mother shaking their clothes to get rid of them. She had even tried to work as a street trader, selling kippers at a penny a pair, until so many customers wanted them on tick she couldn’t carry on.

  They had walked to the workhouse. Mick and his brother holding on to his mother’s hands. It was a walk Mick would never forget, not ever, no matter how long he lived.

  The pauper’s uniform of drabette coat, check neckcloth and fustian trousers had filled him with horror. At eight years old he was given the job of carrying tools for one of the stone-breakers, an old man crippled with rheumatism, hardly capable of holding his hammers as he struggled to break down block stone to road-metal size.

  When the old man died out on the fells with the rain beating down on his face, Mick had turned his back on the road leading to the workhouse and walked away, to live rough for the next three years, stealing, scrounging and begging where he could, until at twelve he had let on his luck and got a job living in on a farm.

  He clenched his big hands on the table in front of him. But young Annie Clancy hadn’t ended up in the workhouse, had she? So he was mothering himself and getting upset about nothing at all.

  He’d seen her. He was sure of it. When had he seen her? Where had he seen her? The eyebrows mingled again as he forced himself to concentrate. When the answer came to him, he banged his fist hard on the table. Barney Eccles! The run-down farm on the high hill, with kids being dragged up in conditions not fit for animals. Barney’s wife, Lily, with a face like a witch, and a soul even blacker. Married to that terrible man who was so mean it was said he would pinch the pennies off his dead grandma’s eyes.

  Mick punched his forehead with his fist as if to beat out the explanation he was groping for. Knowing that young Annie’s father wouldn’t thank him for news of her, but trying to bring to mind someone who would.

  Edith Morris was in two minds whether to let him in when he knocked on her door. She recognised him, of course. Most folks knew Mick Malone, the odd-job man who would turn his hand to anything you asked him to do in return for a meal or a few coppers. Besides, she’d seen him talking to Annie’s step-mother not above an hour ago, so most likely he was looking for work.

  ‘I’ve nothing needs doing, thank you, Mick,’ she said, making a move to close the door.

  Mick snatched off his cap at the sight of this handsome woman with cotton-flecked hair who looked every inch the lady. All the way up the street he’d been planning what to say, and how to say it, fearful lest he was poking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted.

  ‘I’d like a word, Miss,’ he managed at last. ‘About young Annie Clancy.’

  When he’d gone, Edith climbed the narrow stairs to her bedroom and knelt at the altar she’d made from a small table covered by a purple cloth. She spoke directly to the wooden cross.

  ‘Thank You for sending Thy messenger with the news I’ve been waiting for. Forgive me for despairing and forgetting to trust.’ She got up from her knees. ‘Let it be fine on Sunday when I go to fetch her back.’

  Mick Malone spent a lot of time that week trying hard to think what to do for the best. The neatness of Miss Morris’s front room and the spotless cleanliness of herself stayed in his mind. You couldn’t live the whole of your life moving from o
ne hostel, one lodging to another, without appreciating the sight and feel of a proper home. From the gleaming fire brasses to the magnificent aspidistra in its blue bowl, he doubted if he’d ever seen a more inviting or better furnished room.

  ‘You mean you’ve never had a home of your own?’ Miss Morris had looked flabbergasted.

  ‘I’m of no fixed abode, Miss,’ Mick had told her proudly, quoting the description of himself in the paper the time he was up in front of the magistrates for being drunk in charge of a three-wheeled truck. ‘No fixed abode,’ he’d said again.

  ‘I’m coming with you to the Eccles’s farm,’ Mick said straight out when Edith opened the door to him. ‘I’ve been thinking, an’ it’s no place …’ He shuffled his feet, stared down at them. ‘For a lady,’ he finished.

  ‘You’d better come in.’ Edith opened the door wide, trying not to show her pleasure. She accepted that she was indeed a lady. Her mother before her had been one, and her mother before her, but this was the first time she’d been told it straight out.

  Mick Malone was a rough diamond of a man, but he had been so kind when she’d broken down and cried tears of joy on being told that he knew where to find young Annie Clancy. There was a gentleness about him and a way he had of coming out with something so unexpected it caught at the throat.

  ‘I’ve been sick to my heart at the thought of you going up yon on your own,’ he was saying now, accepting the chair by the fire and stretching out his long legs to the blaze. ‘There’s a wind that cuts through to the bones, and besides, Barney Eccles has a tongue on him as filthy as the Thursday night shit-cart.’

  Edith didn’t even flinch. ‘Do you read your Bible every day, Mick?’

  ‘Never been learned how to read, Miss. Never stopped in one place for long enough to have anywhere to keep a book.’

  ‘So you’ve grown up without knowing Jesus, without having Him as your friend?’ Edith leaned forward eagerly, flushing like a girl at the thought of bringing the Word to this plum-nosed, cheerful, hairy man who needed her as much, if not more, than the black heathens in far away Africa.