The Travelling Man (28 page)

In her shiny blue dress she matched the room. They were made for each other, she decided, nodding her head firmly up and down.

She wished someone would come in and tell her what to do. Sure in her mind that to sit down would be bad manners, she stood with clasped hands looking at the closed door. There were two chairs, both in basket weave, with chintz cushions, but knowing what was what, Annie wasn’t to be tempted.

She had another look through the window and saw the two Gray girls being helped on to their horses by a stable lad with hair the colour of a butterpat. He stood back, touched a finger to his forehead and the girls rode off, sitting their horses like men. Annie could hardly believe it. Mrs Gray had been right. Those two wouldn’t take kindly to being measured for elegant dresses with fishtail skirts. Or to wearing long white gloves. Or flowers in their hair. She breathed on the window and rubbed it clean – and missed hearing the door open behind her.

‘Annie Clancy?’

Annie whirled round, her heart sinking at the sight of a tall woman all in black holding a pile of snow-white linen out in front of her. She had a sharp nose, uptilted as if to avoid a bad smell, and a bunch of keys hanging from a wide stiffened belt. Another Johnson, if Annie was any judge, only older and nastier.

The blue dress was being stared at as if the very sight of it was enough to curdle milk. Annie’s heart sank.

‘Yes, I’m Annie Clancy,’ she said.

After another long and telling silence, the tall black-clad woman seemed to have decided to make the best of a bad job. She walked with a strange gliding step over to the long table. ‘I am Mrs Tunstall, the housekeeper. There are sheets, tablecloths, pillowcases and napkins. Hems and long seams to be done on the machine, everything else to be done by hand.’ She stared at Annie’s hands as if surprised to find them clean. ‘Make a list of what you’ve done. I’ll be wanting to check and I’ve not got the time to search everything.’ She indicated a pad and pencil at the corner of the big table. ‘You can write, I take it?’

‘I was top of the class at school, ma’am,’ Annie said. ‘I used to get the sums right quicker than what the teacher could chalk them up on the blackboard.’

She was hoping for a bit of a smile, for a sign of warmth in the long angular face, but there was nothing, not even a slight quiver of the pointed chin.

‘If you come down to the kitchen at going on a quarter to four there’ll be tea. Cook likes the staff to get theirs over with before they have it upstairs.’

‘That’s a kind thought, Mrs Tunstall. I never expected to be having tea.’

The flourishing moustache on the housekeeper’s upper lip moved slightly. ‘I told the mistress you’d be better having it up here, but she thinks you ought to get to know us all.’ The door was closed with a decisive click. ‘God alone knows why,’ her back said, loud and clear.

Annie decided that the housekeeper must have a secret sorrow eating away at her heart. She sat down at the long table and drew a pillowcase towards her, smoothing the fine material with her fingers. Linen. Fine bleached linen with that special sheen on it. Costing a fortune a yard. She ran an expert eye over the scallop-edges, hand-embroidered in cream silks. Two-ply, she guessed from the fineness of them. Holding the pillowcase to her cheek she breathed in its smooth coolness, imagined laying her head on it, night after night. What would she
think
, that hard-faced woman with a body like a stick insect, if she knew that up to leaving home the new seamstress had never known the touch of a sheet or a pillowcase unless she was washing and ironing them for someone else? That rough grey blankets had been her lot.

She had thought that the sheets on Mr Armstrong’s spare-room bed had been the height of luxury, but what had they been but bleached twill? With a faintly superior smile she picked up a corner of a sheet and trailed it down her cheek again. Biddy had told her once that she’d read a story about a Countess who had slept between silken sheets. Black, according to Biddy, to match her nightgown. Annie had thought it was horrible then, and fingering the fine linen she thought it was even more horrible now. She began to thread a needle, licking the end of the cotton first and holding the needle up to the light.

She couldn’t get over what she saw as the first sign that her luck was going to turn for the better. Here she was, sitting in a beautiful room with pictures on the walls, a carpet beneath her feet, a sewing machine decorated with gold scrolls, blue papers of pins to hand, a tray of coloured bobbins and a pair of scissors pretty enough to be hung round her neck on a chain. And she was getting paid for it!

With tiny perfect stitches Annie began to sew a loose border of hand-crocheted lace back on to a tray-cloth.

By the time the hands on the gilt clock on the mantelpiece moved round to half-past three she had worked her way through almost half a pile of linen, sitting by the long table with an unseasonable sun slanting through the windows and the fire flickering in the grate.

Once a small girl wearing a mobcap slipping down over one eye sidled into the room carrying a fresh scuttle of coal. When Annie spoke to her she jumped, but managed to whisper that her name was Gladys and that she was
thirteen
years old, before escaping. ‘I’m Annie …’ It was too late, the maid was gone, slipping through the door like a shadow, anxious to be off, but not before Annie had seen the disbelief flicker for a second in her eyes.

It was the quietness she couldn’t get over. The peace and utter tranquillity of just sitting and sewing without having to get up every few minutes to see to something. She didn’t even have to soil her hands by tending the fire. It was better than anything Biddy could have dreamed up.

At almost a quarter to four she crept down the back stairs into the large basement kitchen.

‘Amen.’

A sombre-suited bald man at the head of a long table was just finishing grace. As Annie hesitated, every head lifted and turned in her direction. She saw eyes widen in astonishment, saw a nudge there, a snigger here. She knew it was the dress, and wanted to sink through the floor.

‘In future you must take your place at the table at least two minutes before Grace is said.’ The man in the black suit motioned her to a seat. ‘And perhaps another day you could see fit to wear something more appropriate. The dress you have on would be more suitable for dancing round the maypole.’

The young girl with the slipping mob-cap who had tended the sewing-room fire gave a nervous snort of a giggle, but a buxom woman presiding over a large brown teapot smiled on Annie with kindness.

‘I take it you have another frock, love?’

‘Oh yes, ma’am,’ Annie agreed at once. ‘Mr Page – Adam – lets me wear all his wife’s dresses. There’s a dark-grey serge, a brown wool, and a black skirt and two blouses I’ve made over.’ In an agony of embarrassment she patted her chest. ‘Mrs Page was a lot less than me.’ She floundered into unnecessary explanation. ‘But then she was ill. The flesh just dropped off her.’ Why didn’t
someone
say something? Why did they all sit there staring at her with their mouths open? Annie gabbled on. ‘I got carried away when I saw this material. It stood out from all the bolts of cotton and silks on the stall at the market …’

‘I bet it did,’ a voice from across the table said, and Annie saw that it was the parlour maid, Johnson.

The butler coughed and, as if at a signal, plates were passed, butter spread on scones, and a large glass jam dish handed round. Annie tried to eat but the food stuck in her throat. She tried to swallow and a crumb went down the wrong way.

‘I think it’s a beautiful dress. You suit it. With you having blue eyes.’

Annie raised her head, turning to the man sitting on her left. He was a black-haired man with a foreign look about him, and she wondered why she hadn’t recognised him at first.

‘You came to the cottage on the day Mrs Gray brought the box of preserves.’

‘I did that.’ The dark eyes teased so that Annie was reminded of another man, another place. But this man was even darker than Laurie, the face thinner, the expression less kindly, more bold. He had a way of slowly nodding his head as he spoke. ‘You were trying the dress on if I remember right.’ Again he nodded, once, twice, three times. ‘I bet old Adam thinks you look a fair treat in it.’

The words were whispered, but Annie had the feeling that everyone sitting round the table heard. She shuddered and moved quickly as she felt a leg pressed against hers. Could no one see what was going on? But everyone was eating as if there wasn’t the chance of another square meal for months. The leg pressed even more closely, and to Annie’s horror she felt it tremble.

Kit Dailey stared in open admiration. She was so close he could see a fine soft down on her cheeks. The lobes of her ears had a fragility about them that made him want to
reach
out a hand and touch. The neck of the peacock-blue dress was cut so low he could see the beginning of a sweet hollow between rounded breasts. The careful pintucks at her waist pushed up and exaggerated the full shape of her. Kit ran his tongue over his lips, and felt the heat rise in him.

‘Would you like a piece of fruit-cake, love?’

Annie saw Cook smiling at her, knife poised over a rich brown cake risen to splendour, sultanas gleaming through its glazed surface. With relief she passed up her plate and took the opportunity to move to the far edge of the chair. She took a bite from the moist spicy cake.

‘If you don’t stop it I’ll knock your chair over,’ she whispered. ‘I’m quite capable of it.’

Looking up she saw Johnson watching her with a look of boss-eyed hatred.

Suddenly Annie wished she had never taken the job, never left the cottage to walk up the long winding drive. Never made the dress. By this time her housework would be done and Adam’s meal would be simmering in the black pan on the trivet or in the fire-oven. She turned her head to the right and met the blank gaze of the boy she had seen down in the stable yard. He was all wetness, eyes, nose and drooling mouth. Annie felt a stir of recognition.

‘This is Toby Eccles,’ Cook said, looking with fondness on the boy. ‘There’s nobody can groom a horse like our Toby.’

The butterpat head dropped to one side, as if the neck had suddenly snapped. Annie smiled on him. So this was the boy Barney Eccles had sent away, the ‘idiot child’, his mother had called him.

‘You’re wasting your time, Annie.’

Kit Dailey was talking directly to her, but she saw that his gaze was fixed on the furious face across the table. Johnson looked so angry Annie wouldn’t have been surprised to see sparks coming out of the top of her head. Annie knew she was being used in
some
sort of game between them and decided to put an end to it.

‘I’ll be getting back to the sewing-room, if you’ll excuse me.’ She stood up and smiled round the table. ‘Thank you for a lovely tea.’

‘You will remain in your place until Grace has been said. Then you may go.’ The butler’s voice dripped scorn. ‘You seem to be lacking in manners, Annie Clancy. We’ll have to try and teach you some.’

‘And finish your cake, love.’

Kit muttered the words from the side of his mouth, but he was heard all right. Annie frowned and looked down at her plate.

‘For what we have received …’

The butler said the words with as much deliberation as if he intoned them from a high pulpit. As he rolled his eyes ceilingwards in an extra prayer of his own, Annie rushed from the kitchen and up the stairs, the blue dress with its elaborate skirt flowing out behind her like a bridal train.

She was breathless by the time she reached the sewing-room. Her hair had slipped from its restraining ribbon, and she’d caught her foot in the hem of her long skirt, tearing a flounce.

She was too angry to cry, too filled with humiliation to get the situation into any kind of perspective. Wearing the dress had been a tragedy, not a simple error of judgement. She
did
look ready to pick up a ribbon and prance round a maypole. The neckline
was
far too low. It was more than likely that the despicable greasy little man sitting next to her at the table had seen her front when she leaned forward in her chair.

Annie actually beat her brow. Accepting that she was a laughing stock, an object of scorn. Downstairs in the kitchen they would still be ridiculing her, pitying her, saying she knew no better.

‘You’re wanted downstairs in the drawing-room.’

The little maid of all work whispered her message, turned and ran. She wished she had dared to speak out at the tea table. She thought that the new girl looked like a fairy-tale princess in the blue dress, with her hair all wavy – without the nightly use of rags, she felt sure. Once when she had to see the school inspector her mother had put her hair in rags to make ringlets, but the nit nurse had said her hair was alive and had best be cut off.

Since then, hair had been the first thing she had noticed about people because from that terrible day when they’d shaved hers off it had never grown back quite the same. She tweaked her cap further down over her forehead, and got back to the kitchen as fast as she could. In case the unthinkable happened and they gave her the sack.

‘Annie!’

Margot Gray tried not to show too much surprise as her new seamstress came into the room dressed to kill. She put a hand to her mouth to hide a smile. It was the dress, of course, the beautifully made, totally unsuitable dress Annie had been trying on when she called at the cottage. Whoever would have imagined she would wear it today? To work?

‘I have …’ she began, but Annie was determined to have her say, to get it over with and admit it was unforgiveable of her.

‘I got carried away, ma’am,’ she said on a rush. ‘It’s the first dress I’ve had that hasn’t been made and worn by somebody else. I won’t come in it tomorrow, and when I get the chance I’ll make myself a dress as black as night with no trimmings, not even a lace collar.’ She made a movement with her hands. ‘It’ll go straight up and down and bag over the chest. In the meantime I’ll wear Mrs Page’s dark-green serge.’