by Marie Joseph
Annie poured just enough warmed water into the larded flour. ‘To tell the truth, I’ve never had such an easy life. I can clean through in a day, and even sit down and read a book when I’ve a liking to. If I’d ever been on my holidays, I’m sure this is what it would be like.’ She tipped the bowl so that the flour came from the sides and began pummelling it into a dough. ‘If I’d been a boy, I know I’d never have gone down the mine to work.’ She gave him a shrewd glance. ‘It would have finished you straight off, Mr Page, you being a man of the soil.’ She thumped the dough down onto the table. ‘Oh, I knew there were fields and hills not far off, but I always played out in the street like everybody else when I was little. After my mother died there wasn’t the time for going walks in the country.’ She blew a strand of hair away from her hot face. ‘Five brothers take some seeing to, Mr Page. I was for ever mending their britches and darning their jumpers, and what I baked went down their throats as quick as it came out of the oven. On top of all that, my father had to bring a lodger home one day.’
Adam sat back on his haunches, the niggling worry in his mind that there was something sadly wrong with the dog forgotten. Clara had never been a one for chattering, and it was pleasant to sit back on his heels and listen to Annie’s light young voice going on and on.
‘You know about the travelling man, Mr Page?’
‘Aye. Clara told me.’ He wished Annie hadn’t brought it up. He hadn’t wanted to hear about it when Clara had explained why Annie had run away from home, and he wanted to hear about it even less now. The thought of Annie and some gyppo from God knows where – the very thought turned his stomach. She was so young; she had such an untouched look about her. God forgive him for comparing her to Clara, but beside his wife she was all freshness and joy. Clara never saw the bright side of owt. If the sun shone she said it overheated her blood, and if the wind blew it gave her a headache. He lowered his head. Annie would go away soon, there was nothing more certain. Leaving him alone.
‘Some men aren’t made to manage on their own.’ He was talking as if to himself. ‘They need a woman about the place.’ He stood up slowly. ‘I’m one of those men, Annie.’
‘You’re right about that.’ She laughed out loud again. ‘I reckon you’d burn a pot of tea if you tried to brew one for yourself. You’re as much use around the house as a rubber hammer.’ She was enjoying the feel of the dough in her hands, he could tell, kneading it with her fists, turning it over and kneading it again.
‘Would you ever think of marrying me, lass?’ he whispered.
At once Annie swung round, staring at him with wide startled eyes, the laughter silenced. ‘You, Mr Page?’ She backed away, bits of dough dripping from her fingers on to the floor. ‘But you’re …’ her voice faltered, but he knew what she had been going to say.
His hands tightened on the dog’s brush. ‘It’s all right, lass. I’m not going to touch you. An’ I know what you’re thinking.’ He walked to his chair by the fire and sat down. ‘You think I’m soft in the head because of Clara dying. You think I don’t know what I’m saying. You think I’m too old, but forty-five isn’t old. You wait till you’re that age and you’ll know.’ His ruddy complexion deepened. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to sleep in my bed, Annie. Not till you’d got used to me, used to being married. I’d leave you be, lass. God knows I’ve had enough practice at that in the last few years.’
Annie reached for a towel and wiped her hands. Clara’s death had turned his brain. It must have. He was taking a plug of tobacco from the jar on the mantelpiece now, cutting it into pieces with his pocket-knife before rubbing it into flakes between his hands, a simple homely gesture she’d seen him make over and over again. Did he realise what he’d just said?
‘I’ll have to go away if you talk like this, Mr Page.’ Annie looked round the room with its shining brasses and polished dresser. ‘I love this cottage, and I get on well with you, Mr Page, but it’s not like … Look, I don’t want to have to go away, not just yet, but if you talk like this I’ll have to go. You’re spoiling things, Mr Page. I wish you’d never …’
‘Come with me, Annie.’ He got up from the chair so abruptly it startled her into backing away. At the foot of the stairs he held out a hand and smiled. ‘Come on! I’ve not gone mad in spite of what you think. Aw, come on, lass. I’m not going to touch you.’
Reluctantly, Annie followed him up the narrow stairway, hesitating at the door of his bedroom, but he was over by the window, down on his knees, prising up a floorboard with the knife he’d been using for cutting tobacco not five minutes before.
‘Over here, Annie … over here.’
He pulled hard at a loose board and, moving into the room, Annie saw how it had been sawn into a short length, so that when it was lifted it revealed a gaping hole. Adam sat back on his heels holding a bag tied together at the top with garden twine.
‘Kneel down here beside me, Annie.’
The knot in the twine needed picking at before he could open the bag. Slowly he upended it, to let a shower of sovereigns cascade down into Annie’s lap. They fell in a shining heap, more money than Annie had ever dreamed could exist. She put her hand to her mouth.
‘Oh, my God! Shove it back, Mr Page!’ She began to scoop up the coins. ‘Put that bag back!’ She was so shocked she hardly knew what she was saying or doing. ‘Hide it away again. Oh, dear God! I wish you’d never showed me that. There’s a king’s ransom there!’
‘Annie!’ Adam couldn’t have wished for a better reaction. ‘Every penny is come by honest. There’s a lifetime’s savings there – my father’s as well as mine.’ He bit hard on a coin and beamed. ‘Every penny saved for the bag, Annie. When you can live off the land, with rabbits for the snaring, eggs from the hens, and vegetables from the garden, you’re never short of a bob or two to put by. I’ve been a saver since I was old enough to tell a tanner from a florin.’ He bared large creamy teeth and Annie recoiled.
How had she come to think that he was a generous man? Not a penny in wages had she been given since she came to the cottage. Come to think of it, she never remembered him spending a penny on anything at all. If it didn’t come from the garden, if it couldn’t be dug up free from the soil, it didn’t come into the cottage.
‘I wish you’d never showed it to me.’ Annie scooped up the last remaining coins and handed them back to him. ‘When you wouldn’t bring the doctor to Mrs Page I thought it was because you couldn’t afford him; when you never offered me any wages I was just grateful to work for you for bed and my keep.’ She stood up and backed towards the door. ‘I know the condition of your wife’s clothes because I’m wearing them. Rags! Patched that often it’s a job to see what they were like when new. But the worst thing of all was you seeing your wife shivering by a fire no bigger than a match flame, an’ I thought it was because you couldn’t afford the coal to bank it up with.’
She ran down the stairs, leaned against the table catching her breath for a moment, then picked up the dough and took out her feelings on it. Trying to pound away the sight of the crouching man upstairs gloating over his savings, letting them run through his fingers, smiling at them with his big teeth. She slapped the dough down so hard that two one-pound loaf tins rose in the air in protest. She could hear a hammering upstairs and pictured the floorboard being banged into place and the rug placed over it again.
When Adam came downstairs he placed five gold sovereigns on the flour-dusted table.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you, lass.’
He was the man she thought she’d known again. Soft spoken, quick and quiet in his movements, edging towards the door as if he couldn’t wait to get out into his beloved fresh air. Annie saw with amazement that his face was filled with satisfied pleasure at his giving.
‘Next week, when the carrier calls up at the house, I want you to ride with him as far as Blackburn, and I want you to take this money with you and buy yourself a new dress and hat. Two dresses and two new hats, if you’ve a mind.’
She had to sit down to get a grip on herself. The sovereigns were there on the table. One, two, three, four, five of them. Hers if she wanted them. Leaning forward, she picked them up and wiped them on her apron. With money like this her mother could have had meat and eggs and milk to build her up after John was born. With money like this to spend on doctors and medicines Clara Page might never have died. A sudden picture of her hunched on the edge of the horse-hair sofa, clutching the threadbare neck shawl round her throat, coughing her life away, misted Annie’s eyes.
She thought of her husband’s shining eyes as he handed her the money and anger rose up, heating her whole body, flushing her face. There were places where consumptives could be nursed, special hospitals where the patients could lie in bed all day to rest their lungs. What rest had poor Mrs Page had till she came along? And what about Annie Clancy – so grateful to be taken in that she worked for nothing, worn cast-off clothes no self-respecting pawnbroker would look at.
With a sudden movement Annie threw the sovereigns to the far end of the room. Then asked herself why she hadn’t hurled them to the back of the fire? The Annie she used to be would have done just that. The Annie she used to be had a temper the colour of her hair and would have felt a certain dignity in refusing to spend such money.
Annie stood up and stretched out her arms, stretched them wide in the shape of a cross. ‘Oh, Mother! My poor misguided little mother, who set such store on dignity. What does that matter compared to sticking up for yourself and fighting for what you believe to be right? You wouldn’t have touched money saved at the expense of a dying woman, not you.’ She lowered her arms. ‘But I am not you, Mother. I am me, Annie Clancy, and it’s time I stopped trying to be like you and trying to please you. An’ my common sense tells me that chucking good money away is no way to best that flamin’old miser!’
In a totally undignified manner she got down on her hands and knees to recover the money. Flat on her stomach to reach a coin that had rolled underneath the dresser. One, two, three, four, five. She counted them again before taking them upstairs to her room.
‘Men!’ she said aloud, when they were safely put away. ‘Edith Morris always said it was a man’s world and she was right.’ Standing there at the window staring down into the garden she decided there wasn’t a man alive worth a tinker’s cuss. Her anger was so enormous, so bursting out of her, it was like a great clearing of the brain, a facing of a truth she’d been too slow to acknowledge, even to herself.
Starting with her father. When had he ever said a kind word to her? When? Drinking his money away so that she had to take in washing to make ends meet. Scrubbing the sweat stains and worse from Mr Thwaite’s revolting clothes. Annie’s fury knew no bounds.
An’ the animal doctor. What about him? Talking to her as though he liked her, putting his hand to the side of her head the day he discovered her father had made her hard of hearing, then making a grab for her the first chance he got. She leaned her hot forehead against the glass. She had thought he was special, but she was wrong. How could he be special when he was a man?
Slowly she went back downstairs, her face set in lines of determination. Why should she walk out like she’d walked out of her father’s house, out of Mr Armstrong’s house, away from Barney Eccles’s farm, to wander the roads like a tramp woman? Mr Page wouldn’t touch her, not now she’d got his measure, not since she’d seen the expression on his wind-burned face as he’d tipped the bag of sovereigns into her lap. Money was his god, always had been and always would be. She greased the tins before dusting them with flour. But her mind wasn’t on what she was doing.
Her mind was on the hat she was going to buy from the hat market in Blackburn. It was also on the dress, the first dress she would ever have chosen for herself. White, she thought, remembering reading in one of Biddy’s magazines that white was the only colour for an unmarried girl to wear. Annie nodded her head up and down furiously. That was exactly what she was – in spite of Laurie Yates and his promise. She was eighteen years old, only just eighteen. An’ she was going to have a dress that fitted her properly. Tight over the bodice and hips, with a little jacket pleated into a basque and a flat bow at the back, only a bow, because the bustle was old fashioned now.
It had said in one of Biddy’s magazines that a fish-tail skirt was popular down in London. There had been a picture of one, tight-fitting right down to the ankle. The mannequins showing them off had to wear an ankle chain to stop them from taking too big a stride and splitting! And underneath they wore a chamois leather narrow petticoat so their knees could only move an inch at a time.
Biddy had nearly bust herself laughing when Annie had demonstrated how she imagined the mannequins would be forced to walk, wiggling her way down the hall taking tiny mincing steps. Annie’s mouth set hard as she remembered Mr Armstrong coming in the front door and grinning at the sight of her.
She dismissed that memory with a narrowing of her eyes. Seth Armstrong was no better than the rest, and maybe worse, because he had pretended to care.
When Adam came in from work his meal was ready and waiting for him as usual. Annie told him that she accepted the five sovereigns, thank you very much, and suggested he paid her four shillings a week, to be back-dated to two weeks after the day she arrived.
‘Do you think I’m bow-legged wi’ brass?’ he wanted to know, as she slid a nice helping of plum pie in front of him, but she knew he would give in.
‘An’ we won’t mention the other matter, Mr Page?’
‘You’re a hard woman, Annie Clancy.’
‘I know.’
‘An’ you’ll stop on?’
‘If you agree to what I’ve just said.’
He took a slice of buttered new bread from the plate and folded it in two with an angry movement. ‘By heck, Annie, you drive a hard bargain.’ But the light was back in his brown eyes.
She knew she had won.
During the night the dog was sick and when he tried to follow Adam to the door, his legs buckled beneath him. For four days he refused his food, lying on a sack by the fire with glazed eyes, his coat as dull as the ashes in the pan Annie carried out each morning to the midden.
Adam cornered Harry Gray down by the stables and asked if he could take half a day off work to wheel the dog in a barrow across the field to Seth Armstrong’s place ‘It’s serious this time, Mester. Yon dog’s never been off his food for as long as this.’
Harry Gray had a habit of addressing his outdoor workers over a shoulder as he walked away from them. ‘I’ll do better than that, Adam. I’ve a horse needs looking at and my wife was only saying last night that it’s time we had Armstrong over to dinner. I’ll get a message to him today.’
When Adam told Annie that he’d managed to get her a ride into town with the carrier for the next morning she was delighted, but when he told her that Seth Armstrong was coming to look at the dog, her smile vanished as rapidly as if an Indian rubber had been taken to it.
‘You don’t think much of him, then?’
Annie nodded towards the basket in front of the fire where the dog slept, a twitching, pain-filled sleep. ‘If anyone can make him better Mr Armstrong can. Biddy said he had the healing touch in his hands.’
‘Biddy?’
‘The girl who worked for him.’
‘I never saw no Biddy the last time I was over there. I saw that weasel-faced housekeeper of his, and I saw you.’
Annie neatly side-stepped his outstretched hand and walked out into the garden. The late afternoon sun warmed the leaves to russet-gold, and there was the scent of wood-smoke in the air. Annie turned as usual to look back at the cottage.
She must have been more than a bit doolally to think that the gardener would be willing to carry on treating her like a daughter. He’d started trimming his moustache and combing his thic
k brown hair, and today he’d brought a great bunch of michaelmas daisies inside and watched her arrange them in a copperjug, never taking his eyes off her. Twice last week he’d come up behind her when she was at the slopstone, so close that she’d felt his breath on her neck. Once she’d imagined that he had touched her hair, and known that one small step backwards would have brought her close up against him. She shook her head from side to side. Why hadn’t she realised, long before he spoke out, that he was getting ideas? Why had she believed he was old enough to know better?
‘Men!’ she said aloud, sounding so much like Edith Morris that if she’d recognised the resemblance for herself she would have burst out laughing.
She was glad she wouldn’t be there when Mr Armstrong came the next day. Meeting her again would be a terrible embarrassment to both of them. ‘Annie Clancy!’ he’d say, pretending he was so happy to see her again. ‘So this is where you got to!’
Just as if he’d never talked to her till midnight, set her tongue wagging with a glass of wine at times, told her his life story, a real sob story, thinking he was softening her up for what he had in mind. Just as if he had never gone to Eccles’s farm, knowing she was there but never asking after her. Riding away down the hill on his black horse in that silly black hat.
Annie walked slowly back down the path. Oh, yes. She was glad all right that she wouldn’t be there when the animal doctor called the next day.
11
SETH ALWAYS HATED telling a man that his dog would have to be put down. Some men openly wept, while others pretended they had expected it anyway, agreeing that it was for the best.
The gardener’s expression was hard to read. ‘I knew he was bad, Mr Armstrong. His age goes against him, doesn’t it?’
Seth nodded, explaining that the form of dropsy Rex was suffering from was abdominal, an obstruction of the liver.
‘But you can treat him, Mr Armstrong?’
‘If he was a young dog, yes. I’d suggest two to five grains of calomel a week, and show you how to rub his right side here, from the last rib to the hip with embrocation, but …’ Seth stroked the dog’s face. ‘I only wish there was some way, but it would be cruel to put him through so much suffering for nothing. He’s very jaundiced, Adam.’