The Travelling Man (24 page)

‘She was wearing one of your old hats, Mama.’

‘With her hair pinned up underneath it like a beehive, Mama.’

‘I gave it to Clara years ago. Because you said you hated me wearing black.’

‘I
hate
black,’ Harry Gray said. ‘Especially on women. Makes them look like a lot of old crows. Which reminds me, the rooks have returned to the rookery. Seemingly overnight.’

Annie knew that folks were saying that she was living over the brush with the gardener. How they could even think such a thing was beyond her, when they must know for a fact that he was old enough to be her father. Anyway, since his wife’s death he had gone about as if he carried a heavy parcel of misery on his back. It had taken her all her time to persuade him to sit down at the table and eat. It took even more nagging to get him to change his clothes, and as for his hands …

‘Muck is muck,’ she told him firmly. ‘It can come from down the pit or from the soil, but it’s still the same.
Muck
. It was hard work forcing the lads at home to wash their hands before they came to the table.’ Her eyes clouded. ‘My dad never bothered. He used to say we’d all to eat a ton of dirt before we died, anyroad.’ Using the tips of her fingers she rubbed lard into the bowl of flour. ‘I swore I’d never go back, but mebbe one day … just to see how they are.’

Adam was at the open door of the cottage, brushing his dog’s moulting coat. ‘You can’t go back,’ he said quickly. ‘It would only upset you, and besides, that woman your dad married won’t want you now any more than she did then.’ He looked anxious. ‘You’re all right here, aren’t you?’

‘I’m more than all right here, Mr Page. Looking after you and this cottage is nowt-a-penny to what it was when I lived at home. D’you know what me mother would have said?’

‘No.’ Adam went on brushing the dog’s tail. ‘What would she have said, Annie?’

‘You’ve let on your feet there, Annie Clancy!’

When she laughed he put the brush down and stared hard at her. For a whole week now there had been a thick dank mist filling the valley like smoke in the mornings, and he was pretty sure the swallows had left. The harvest was safely gathered in and soon, unless the ploughed land dried out, the land work would begin. He had always been a man who liked his home comforts, and with Annie around the place he accepted that he had never been looked after as well in the whole of his marriage. In the whole of his life, in fact. Clara had done her best, but even before she took really ill she was always a bit slap-dash about housework and baking. Now this young lass, she’d have him in the dolly-tub on washday if he wasn’t careful.

‘There!’ she was saying now. ‘You’ve smiled and your face hasn’t cracked – wonders never cease!’

Her arms were flour-spattered, there was a blob of it on her nose. Months of good food, mostly from the garden, had brought a healthy glow to her cheeks and made her eyes sparkle. Adam looked away from her and frowned at the handfuls of hair coming away from the dog’s lifeless coat.

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.’

He was at the door in two strides, obviously well pleased with himself. As he walked down the path Annie heard him whistling, an obviously reluctant dog at his heels.

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?