The Travelling Man (20 page)

Adam’s wife, Clara, had the feverish eyes and highly flushed cheeks of the consumptive. She had ‘enjoyed’ bad health for years, never coughed once when twice sounded better, and foretold her death in the tone of one who had never looked on the bright side for the simple reason that she would have found it much too mundane. As a permanent invalid she got the attention she craved, and now with this red-haired girl waiting on her hand and foot, even to the extent of anticipating her needs, she had actually found herself smiling once or twice.

‘I’ve not got long to go, Annie,’ she said one sunny morning.

‘You mustn’t say that, Mrs Page.’ Annie was standing on a four-legged stool, taking the pewter tankards down from the high mantelpiece to give them a much needed dust. ‘I’ve known hundreds of folks with your complaint,’ she exaggerated, ‘and they all lived for years and years. Have you tried scooping a turnip out and filling the hole with honey, then letting it ferment? A neighbour across the street from us swore by it for her son.’ Deliberately she pushed from her memory the sad
day
when the child had been boxed and carried out to the cart, with every window-blind in the long street pulled down to show respect. ‘It did him a power of good,’ she lied.

‘Tell me about your street, Annie.’ Clara lowered herself down on to the horse-hair sofa drawn up at right angles to the fire. ‘Adam told me about you working for Mr Armstrong then going on up to Barney Eccles’s farm, but what about before?’

Annie got down from the stool. She had taken a liking to the gardener’s wife, with her doom-laden voice and her way of relishing and enjoying bad news. It had taken her no more than these two days to discover that the way to Clara’s heart was to tell her details of terrible accidents, preferably fatal. She had worked out that hearing of tragedy somehow helped Clara Page to cope with her own misfortune.

‘I’ll be getting on with the rabbit for the dinner while I tell you about what happened before,’ she said. ‘You lie back and get your feet up. I learnt how to do this at the Eccles’s place.’

The rabbit lay on the bare table, its eyes wide open, its mouth drawn back from its teeth in a last desperate grimace. Annie took up a long knife and steeling herself, brought it down with a whacking thump on the rabbit’s lolling neck.

‘My father threw me out because I was expecting,’ she said. ‘He couldn’t bear the shame of what people in the street would say.’

Clara’s whole face was transformed. Incest was common enough in the teeming streets of Liverpool where she’d been brought up, but she’d never come across it at first hand before.

‘Oh, you poor child,’ she said, coughing into her hand. ‘Men like your father should be hanged. By their johnwillies.’

‘It wasn’t my father, Mrs Page!’ Annie stared down at the spilling tendons of the dead rabbit, feeling her
stomach
rise up in protest. ‘The only time my father touched me was to wallop me one.’

‘Some men get their satisfaction in that way.’ Clara nodded wisely.

Annie looked her employer straight in the eyes. If she was going to stop on here in this lovely cottage she had to tell the truth. Word got round; rumours spread. Anyway the truth of what had happened would cheer Mrs Page up no end.

‘A sailor came to lodge with us. He was kind to me and I thought he was the most … the nicest man I’d ever seen in my whole life. He had black hair that curled over his forehead; he had a brown face and he said things that made me laugh. He told me stories of where he’d been. He’d been to India, and China, but when he went to work down the mine he changed.’ She sighed. ‘He even looked different, and it wasn’t just the pit dirt, it was the way he walked and talked. The mine would have killed a man like him.’

‘And you were sweet on him?’

Annie raised the knife again. There had been plenty of time to think as she walked the roads, hungry and thirsty, not knowing where she was going to end up. A lot of the time she had been thinking about Laurie. She wished she could remember his face clearly, but there were times when she saw it merely as a blur, like a photograph not quite in focus. That’s what he was, a blur. He was never going to come back, not on her birthday in September, or ever. He had pretended to go along with her talk of marriage and plans for their future together. She brought the knife down hard again. There was no future for them. There never had been …

‘Annie?
Were
you sweet on the sailor?’ Clara had forgotten to cough.

‘I loved him till my heart ached,’ Annie said. ‘He came in the door one day just after my father had given me a good beating.’ She closed her eyes at the memory of it. ‘So Laurie comforted me in the best way he knew.’ She
slit
the rabbit’s skin from the neck down. ‘I let him do it. He didn’t force me. I’d only myself to blame, you see. I didn’t struggle.’

‘What did he say when you told him you’d fallen for a baby?’

‘He never knew.’

‘You never told him?’

‘I never had the chance. He went away the very next day.’

‘What a shocking thing to do.’ Clara’s eyes softened with genuine sympathy. ‘There’s some terrible men in the world.’

Annie raised her eyes. ‘Oh, he promised to come back and marry me on my next birthday. An’ I believed him! Can you credit that? We stood together in the sight of God and made our vows, an’ all the time he was planning on going away the very next morning.’ She wrapped the rabbit’s head in a sheet of newspaper, and as she did so the picture came into her mind of Biddy following the animal doctor’s instructions and wrapping something up in newspaper at the bottom end of the bed. ‘I lost the baby,’ she said, feeling again the dragging pain in her back. She tore at the rabbit’s legs with her hands. ‘I ought to be saying I’m sorry, but I’m not. If I’ve to get by on my own from now on a baby would be a big handicap.’

‘That’s a hard thing to say, love.’

Annie shook her head. ‘Do you know where I’d be if I’d gone on and had that baby? For a start it would have been born in the workhouse, to be taken from me if it was healthy for adoption by a couple who couldn’t have babies.’

‘Like me,’ Clara said, in her suffering voice. ‘Though I’ve never been strong enough to rear a child. What sort of a life would a child of mine have had? I couldn’t have looked after it, that’s definite. I would probably have died in childbirth any road. In agony.’ That prospect seemed to cheer her. ‘Then what would Adam have done? He
needs
me. Them up at the big house work him till he’s fit to drop.’ She swung twig-thin legs to the floor. ‘There were drifts of snow high enough to bury a standing man in February. Adam used to come in with icicles on his eyebrows, and the dog plastered in snow with just two holes to show where his eyes were. But did them up there care? I doubt if t’master would have lifted a finger to dig Adam out if he’d got himself buried in a snow-drift.’

‘Mr Page seems to speak well of them.’

‘Mr Page would shake hands with the devil. Then ask him to his tea,’ said Clara, staring mournfully into the fire.

In June the long sweep of lawn in front of the big house became scorched in patches by the heat of the sun. Over in the fields the hay was baled, but before it could be got inside the rain came. At the end of June, Adam took Annie to one side and asked her if she would forget her intention of getting work up at the big house and stay at the cottage to look after his wife.

‘I reckon she’ll be bedfast by the winter. Will you promise me you’ll do that, lass?’

That night when she went to bed Annie sat without moving for a long time on the edge of her narrow bed.

‘Promise?’ She said the word aloud, kicking out at a cut rug, sending it skidding across the floorboards. She wanted nothing to do with promises. Laurie had promised her on his life that he would love her for ever, and now she was hard put to it to remember the way he looked or the way he talked. The blue ribbon was gone. The last time she’d seen it, it had been draped over a spotted mirror in her room at the Eccles’s farm. Even the memory of Laurie’s footsteps as he’d walked away from her down the street, the sack over his shoulder, was dimming fast.

She knew what the gardener had meant when he’d asked her to promise to stay to look after his wife. Stay till the end, he’d meant. Stay till she went to skin and
bone
, and her eyes stared from her head like chapel hat pegs. Stay till she took to the couch by the fire, coughing her heart up, bringing up buckets of blood.

Annie walked over to the window and looked out into the garden. There was the rumbled menace of thunder to the east, the air was hot and sticky. That afternoon Clara had sat outside the door for a while, reminding Annie so much of her own mother that her heart had turned over. She couldn’t go through that again, not the agonised watching and waiting as someone died. Mr Page would have to understand that she couldn’t promise him anything. Annie clenched her hands. What was a promise, anyway? Just words to be broken, that was all.

‘I promise,’ Laurie had said in his lilting voice.

‘He’d be one of the travelling men,’ Seth Armstrong had explained. ‘They have the urge always to be moving on, they can’t be tied down. Are you listening to me, Annie?’ he’d asked her.

Oh, yes, she’d been listening, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that.

The rain was falling now, sweeping down from black curling clouds. Annie moved away from the window and snatched off her white cap, one of Clara Page’s hand-me-downs. Sometimes the things people said, especially the hurtful things, lingered on in the mind and wouldn’t go away. As he talked to her that day the animal doctor had been trying to revive a dying bird, a thrush caught up in the wire fence at the bottom of the long garden. Annie had watched, holding her breath as the ends of the wing feathers were tied before being glued to the flank of the terrified bird.

‘Will it live?’ she remembered asking, even as the fluttering suddenly stopped.

‘Nothing lasts for ever,’ he had said. ‘Even promises are often broken.’

Annie knew exactly what he was trying to tell her. She
had
ignored it though, so why was she remembering it exactly after all this time?

She unbuttoned her blouse, her frayed camisole, and began to wash her top half, working the soap into a good lather with the soft water. Patting herself dry, she slipped one of Clara’s old nightgowns over her head before soaping her lower half. For decency’s sake, the way her mother had taught her.

Soon the family up at the big house would be coming back from France. Mrs Page had explained that Mrs Gray was half French, with two step-daughters well into their twenties and shamefully unmarried. Annie climbed into bed. If she was to get work at the big house she would have to apply the minute they got back. Closing her eyes, she tried to bring to mind a story in one of Biddy’s magazines.

It was about a girl with raven-black hair who worked for a noble family living in a remote Scottish castle. This girl wore a black sateen dress, a white muslin apron, and a frilled cap on her high-piled hair. She had never known who her father was, but you could tell he’d been gentry by the way she’d inherited small feet and dainty ankles. She was waiting at table one evening, the Glen outside the castle filled with the scent of heather, when all at once she saw the Duke staring at her with blue fire in his eyes. She was so overcome that she dropped a dish of roast potatoes on to the silken lap of an honoured guest, and burst into silent tears which slid pitifully down her creamy cheeks.

It was love at first sight, and after many vicissitudes the Duke married her. His mother not only overlooked the girl’s humble beginnings, but personally turned her into a lady, correcting her speech and showing her which knife and fork to use.

The story had made Annie laugh out loud, but the black sateen dress and white frilled cap had stayed in her mind.

Throwing back the blankets she went to the mirror
scooping
her long hair up on top of her head, imagining herself with a froth of white pinned on to it.

Up at the big house she would be working with and touching beautiful things. She had never been inside, but she knew in her head exactly how it would be.

And she knew more than most how it would be if she promised to nurse Clara Page till she died. It was her mother over again; it was the smell of sickness, and the sponging down of a body racked with pain, wet with sweat. She wanted … oh, dear God, she wanted a bit of
life
. She wanted a lot of life, the chance to be young and to wear a dress specially made for her. All at once she was back pleading with her father for just that. Instinctively her hand went to and covered her left ear, holding the pain in as she remembered it.

The next day she told Adam that she would stay, and the following week the family from the big house came back from the south of France.

Margot Gray was driving herself in her own pony-cart down the long avenue lined with trees when she first saw the gardener’s little protegée chasing a wandering hen back across the road. Immediately she pulled on the reins.

So this was the tramp woman Adam was supposed to have fetched in from the rain! Her eyes twinkled at the sight of the small girl with red curly hair wisping from the confines of a blue headscarf. This was no orphan waif with pallid looks and downcast eyes. There was what she would guess to be a wealth of intelligence in the bright eyes, a hint of spirit in the way the girl bobbed only half a curtsey.

‘So you are to housekeep for Adam, and nurse his wife?’

‘Yes, ma’am. For the time being, anyway.’

‘And then?’

‘What will be, will be, ma’am.’

‘Do you mean that?’

‘Not really. I’ll probably have to prod things along a bit.’

Margot was intrigued. The girl was talking to her as an equal. It was obvious she had never gone into service, never been taught the rudiments of deferential behaviour.

‘Your name is …?’

‘Annie, ma’am. Annie Clancy.’

Margot nodded. ‘You must take good care of Adam, child. He’s been around this place even longer than I. He could grow a flower from a stone. You know that?’