The Travelling Man

by Marie Joseph

  When Annie got back home she was joined almost immediately by a small boy with the build of a stunted gnome.

  ‘Where’s me tea, our Annie?’ Snatching off his cap he skimmed it onto the table. ‘Me back’s sticking to me front I’m that clemmed.’

  Annie rounded on him, her anger far from spent. ‘How many times have I to tell you, our Georgie, not to put your mucky cap on my clean table?’ She jerked her head. ‘Out in the back with it, then get your head underneath the tap before the boys come in from school. You’re all sitting down together for once, and if our dad misses his tea then it’s his own look-out!’

  Not all that long ago Annie had been able to talk to her younger brother. She’d been able to confide in him, unburden herself to him. A month ago he would often get the coal in for her, side the table, chivvy the other boys to bed, crack a joke with her, but now he was a miner he was above behaving like a sissie. Already Annie could see him turning into a replica of all the other pitmen she knew who treated their women with a superior contempt. Annie had seen the same happen to a lot of lads once they followed their fathers down the mine. She had noticed that the relationship between them changed from that very first time they stood together in the pit cage, to drop far, far below the ground. From that day on they were brothers, not father and son.

  ‘Where’s me dad gone to?’

  Georgie had no intention of doing what he was told, and Annie knew it. He was staring at her with eyes set in a face as black as pitch, showing her who was boss.

  ‘I don’t know where he’s gone. Your dad never tells anybody where he’s goin’, an’ you know it.’ She moved to the fire to stir a brown stew glistening with globules of fat, then took the poker and moved the trivet away from the glowing coals. ‘I suppose if I ask you about this lodger he’s wanting to bring here, you’ll say you know nothing about it?’

  Straightening up, she saw her brother slowly backing away. ‘Oh, our Georgie, why don’t you stick up for me like you used to? Just this once?’

  Opening a drawer set in the side of the big square table she scattered spoons in a heap before setting them out: ‘Billy, Timmy, Eddie, John, Georgie, our Dad, and me, if there’s time to sit down.’

  She dropped onto a stool as a stab of pain shot through her ear. Closed her eyes and pressed her lips tightly together.

  When she opened her eyes again Georgie had gone out, and standing in his place was a man she had never seen before.

  2

  THE SEPTEMBER SUN was as weak as blue milk, but even so, coming out of it into the gloom of the small front room, Laurie Yates thought the bowed figure was a boy. But when Annie straightened up he saw her blouse straining across her chest and guessed it was Jack Clancy’s daughter. He held out his hand.

  ‘Miss Clancy?’

  Her hair was bundled up into a man’s cap; she had the pointed features of a half-starved child, but her eyes wore the bleak expression of a disillusioned woman. A piece of sacking round her waist formed an apron of sorts, and her feet were stuck into miner’s boots. She would be, he reckoned, about fourteen years old. If that.

  ‘Miss Clancy?’ Was she deaf, dim-witted? Or both?

  Annie felt her mouth drop open and forget to shut itself. Nobody had ever called her Miss Clancy before. Not even the priest, and he knew his manners if anybody did. The shock of it brought her to her feet. The pleasure of it made her blush. Wiping her hand first on her long skirt, she shook hands with the stranger, too flabbergasted to think of the right thing to say.

  ‘Your father said I would find you here.’

  Annie couldn’t hide her astonishment. So this was the lodger who was looking for a place to stay and a job down the mine? This man had an ease and grace about him, with a voice that held the lilt of music. To her way of thinking all sailors had rough red faces half hidden behind bushy beards, but this man was clean-shaven with a head of close black curls. His skin was different too, swarthy, not grey like her father’s when the pit dirt was washed from it. He was out of place; he didn’t belong. As out of place as a flower on a muck midden.

  ‘I’m Laurie Yates,’ he was saying. ‘I told your father I would look around for a bed, but he insisted I come here.’

  Annie was getting her breath back now. For a minute or two she’d been in danger of letting herself be taken in by a soft voice and a wheedling smile. But this Laurie Yates was only another man, with an appetite to satisfy and dirty clothes to wash. She wasn’t going to let him soft-soap her, even if he had got round her father over a tankard of ale.

  Deliberately she turned her back on him to get seven plates down from the range.

  ‘You can’t stop here, Mr Yates, there’s not the room.’ She set the plates round the table. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Not even room for a little ’un.’ She turned round suddenly, long skirt swinging out. ‘You can see how it is without me having to spell it out for you.’

  Laurie Yates could see how it was all right. When the fresh colour had drained from this young girl’s face, he had seen the clear imprints of fingers on her left cheek. Oh, no indeed, there was no room for an extra one in this small room dominated by the big table and the black fireplace with its lofty mantelpiece. He smiled on her.

  ‘I’ll be on my way then, Miss Clancy. I’m sorry to have bothered you. A man only needs half an eye to see that one extra would be an intolerable burden on your hospitality.’

  ‘Sit down!’

  Annie pointed to her father’s rocking-chair. ‘I’d be a disgrace to me mother if I didn’t offer you a sup of something or a bite to eat.’ She studied him, hands on hips. ‘She never sent a stranger away from the door without giving him a crust, even if it was the last in the house. So for me mother’s sake, Laurie Yates, sit yourself down.’

  She added a good handful of oatmeal to the stew simmering in the big black pan, bending over showing the rounded shape of her buttocks, totally without self-consciousness, like a child, not caring how she looked or what she revealed.

  Laurie was intrigued. She wasn’t a child, and yet she was entirely without feminine guile, if that was the word he was thinking of.

  She straightened up and pointed the wooden spoon at him. ‘Have you ever been down a mine, Mr Yates?’

  The smell coming from the pan was bringing the saliva to Laurie’s mouth. He had walked from Blackburn, and apart from a hunk of bread and a drink of water, his stomach had remained empty all day. He was so hungry he could have snatched the spoon from her and helped himself to the thick bubbling stew, stiff with potatoes, laced with onions and nutty with oatmeal.

  Yesterday a woman tending her herb garden had invited him into her cottage and heaped a plate with potato cakes fresh from the griddle, spreading them with butter that ran down his chin as he ate. She had told him he reminded her of her dead son, but Laurie had known she was lying. Her dead lover, more like it, he’d guessed, trying not to look too relieved when her husband had come in from the quarry covered with white dust, none too pleased that this black-haired stranger was sitting there calmly eating what should have been his tea.

  ‘Aye, there’s a job going at the quarry,’ he told Laurie. ‘There’s a man needed to wheel the rubbish away on a bogie to the tip. A muck-chucker,’ he added spitefully, licking his lips as Laurie chased the last dregs of runny butter with his finger. ‘Hard work, but then I suppose you’re used to that?’

  ‘Not in my line, I’m afraid.’ Laurie sat back patting his satisfied stomach. ‘But thanks all the same.’ He had walked away, leaving husband and wife at each other’s throats, squaring up to each other like a couple of fighting cocks.

  He smiled at the memory. ‘No, I’ve never been down a mine, Miss Clancy.’ If this ragamuffin had resembled, however remotely, a woman, he would have had her on his knee whistle-quick. As it was, she was best humoured if he was going to get a taste of that stew.

  ‘But you’ve been across the sea?’

  He grinned. ‘You could say I’ve been across the se
a.’

  ‘Where to?’

  Laurie turned his head away from the tantalising smell. Any minute now and he’d be down on his knees pleading with her to give him a bowlful of the magnificently bodied broth, or whatever she chose to call it.

  ‘Oh, to lots of places,’ he forced himself to say. ‘Too many to tell.’

  ‘To India?’

  ‘Yes. To India.’

  She was at the table now, sawing away at a cob of crusty bread. He clenched both hands hard to stop himself from leaping out of the chair and grabbing a piece. He set the chair rocking. ‘A mucky, dirty place, India.’

  Immediately the ragamuffin stopped what she was doing and pointed the knife at him.

  ‘Mucky?’ Her voice shook. ‘I learnt about India when I went to school, and my teacher didn’t say nothing about it being mucky! I’ve seen pictures of India in a book. The sky was blue, and all the people were dressed in white. White, Mr Yates. Out in the streets in white.’ She put the knife down on the table. ‘You wear a white blouse or a white shirt here and it’s mucky before you’ve had time to fasten the buttons. The dirt’s in the air here, an’ if it’s damp, which it usually is, you fetch the washing in covered in sooty flecks. I wash for three families round here as well as my own, so I know what I’m talking about.’ She attacked the bread again. ‘You go down that mine, Mr Yates, an’ you’ll soon wish you were back in India looking spotless.’

  ‘You mean to tell me you take in washing? As well as looking after your family? You don’t look old enough to have left school.’

  Annie ignored him. ‘An’ what about when you’re out at sea? Is the sea mucky? Is the air mucky? Best thing you can do is go right back to where you’ve come from before you end up like me dad, and like our Georgie.’ Her voice rose. ‘An’ like our Billy, our Timmy, our Eddie and our John. Because they’ll all go the same way once they’ve left school and gone down the mine.’

  She tossed the pieces of bread one by one on to a plate, her tongue protruding slightly as she counted them.

  ‘Want me to tell you something for nothing, Mr Yates?’

  The pain was back in her ear; it was a frightening pain, as if a red-hot needle was being poked into it. That was the ear her father always boxed, him being righthanded, and lately there had been tell-tale yellow marks on her pillow in the mornings. As though something was festering away inside. She felt the shameful prick of tears behind her eyes.

  ‘One of these fine days I’m going to walk away from this place an’ never come back. Just as soon as our little John is big enough to look after himself.’ A sob rose in her throat. ‘I don’t know where I’ll go but I’ll find a place somewhere.’ She held out her hands. ‘I can work with these till I drop. I’m strong as an ox. Me mother used to say I was the strongest lad in the family.’ Her voice was ragged with tears. ‘When she was on her last I could lift her in and out of bed.’ She cupped her hands. ‘Before she died, her neck was no bigger than this, an’ her wrists …’ she made a circle with a finger and thumb ‘… as tiny as that. She was wore out with having babies, one after another. She had nine altogether, but lost three after I was born. There was only eleven months between our Eddie and our John. When she died she only had half a shroud because me dad went out and drank his wages away. Half a shroud, Mr Yates! To save money!’

  The needle in her ear was twisting itself round and round. She couldn’t help putting a hand over it. It was driving her mad. It was making her speak so freely to this stranger, she could hardly believe the words coming from her mouth. It was as though she was saying things that had been dammed up inside her for a long, long time.

  ‘An’ I’ll tell you another thing. Some day I’m going to have a house with a piece of carpet on the floor, an’ I’m going to have a tablecloth on a table. A white lace tablecloth, Mr Yates, that’ll come up lovely each time it’s washed and starched, an’ keep its whiteness too with a bit of dolly-blue in the rinsing water.’ She banged her hand down hard on the big square table. ‘An’ it won’t be this shape. It’ll be round, so that the cloth can fall down in folds.’ She clasped her hands together. ‘I saw one once, an’ I’ve never forgotten it.’

  Laurie Yates didn’t know what to make of this young lass standing there, trying not to cry, pouring out her heart to him, a stranger she’d met only a few minutes ago. He was hungry and tired. He needed food and a bed. In that order, so with an effort he summoned up the charm that never failed him.

  ‘I’ll buy you a lace tablecloth, love. When I get my first pay packet I’ll be away to the nearest market to pick out the whitest and laciest cloth I can find.’

  When she rushed out to the back he stretched both arms above his head and grinned, fully aware of the effect his words had had on Annie. He closed his eyes to shut out the sight of the bread so tantalisingly near. She’d counted them too carefully not to miss a piece, and if he was to get his feet underneath the table he had to tread warily.

  Something told him he might just be in luck here. Missing his ship in Liverpool hadn’t dismayed him for long. It had been his own fault anyway, dallying with a night woman with a tongue on her like a whiplash. Her temper had made him laugh, and the more he’d laughed the madder she’d got. He could still hear her strident voice as she’d yelled abuse after him, shaking her fist through the open window of her room in the tall, overcrowded house near the docks.

  ‘I don’t need to work for bloody nowt, sailor!’ she’d shouted, and the thought of her slack body had bothered him for a few miles, until he shrugged her memory away.

  Now, after being on the road for almost two weeks, he was ready to get his head down for a while. Sleeping rough had made him thankful that the fine weather had held. The long walk had soothed the restlessness inside him, brought him to some kind of peace with himself. Now he had run out of money, he accepted it was either find work or starve.

  What was she doing, the strange young girl, out there at the back? Letting the tears come, he guessed. Splashing her face with cold water from the tap her father had boasted about.

  ‘Most summers,’ Jack Clancy had explained, ‘the houses at the top of our street are without water for three months or more. There’s just not enough for the source to supply all the houses. It’s all got to be fetched. Every bloody drop.’

  Had young Annie been carrying the water up the steep cobbled street all summer long? Bucket by backbreaking bucket? Laurie assumed a hang-dog expression as she came through the door. He picked up his bundle.

  ‘I’ll be on my way. God go with you, Miss Clancy.’

  That did it. Annie had grown up with a lot of respect for the Almighty, even though her mother had become a non-believer and her father was a lapsed Catholic.

  ‘Do you believe in God, Mr Yates?’

  Laurie, sensing his luck could be on the turn, immediately crossed himself. ‘I walk with Him. Every step of the way,’ he said.

  Annie knew when she was beat. Folding her arms, she nodded sternly at the rag rug in front of the stone hearth.

  ‘You’ll have to sleep on that. There’s no bed. An’ just for the night – that’s all.’

  ‘You’re an angel of mercy, Miss Clancy.’ Laurie doffed an imaginary cap.

  ‘You’ll soon find different,’ Annie said.

  A clatter of clogs on the cobbles heralded the four young Clancy boys coming home from school. Annie moved towards the great soot-blackened pan on the trivet, nodded at the bench drawn up to the table.

  ‘Get yourself a seat, Mr Yates. It’ll be a bit of a squash, but that’s your lookout. If I can make this stew go round seven, I don’t suppose one more will make much difference. You’ll have to fill up with bread.’

  Laurie was at the table in a flash. Annie could read his face easily. He was as hungry as a hunter. Sick from the want of food, she guessed. Her own expression softened for a moment, then hardened again. What was he but another man, another mouth to feed? As black-haired and wily as the boys coming through the door.

&nb
sp; ‘Billy, Timmy, Eddie, John.’ Laurie chanted their names as they formed a semi-circle to stare at him. ‘Bless the bed that I lay on.’

  ‘Who’s yon fella, our Annie?’ Billy, coming up to eleven, obviously reckoned nothing of the stranger sitting in what was normally his place at the table. ‘Has he come to his tea?’

  Annie half smiled an apology at Laurie. ‘We’re not used to company,’ she said in way of explanation.

  ‘Except when Father O’Leary comes.’ Timmy at ten, the serious clever one, took everything that was said to him literally. ‘Once when our Annie had made an oven-bottom cake he scoffed the lot.’

  ‘An’ licked the butter from his plate.’ Eddie, at eight already the black sheep of the family, narrowed dark eyes into wicked slits.

  ‘The cheeky monkey,’ little John added, wanting to get in on the act. Then he sat on the end of the bench and wriggled his way along till he came close to Laurie. ‘I got whacked at school today,’ he confided. ‘For spittin’.’

  ‘How far?’ Laurie wanted to know, and they all burst out laughing.

  That was the moment Annie decided that as long as he didn’t overstay his welcome, Mr Yates could stop on for a while.

  She was very quiet as she ladled out the full-bodied stew. Her father and Georgie sidled in and took their places at the table as promptly as if she’d stood at the door and banged a gong. It was a long time since she’d heard laughter like that round the table. The boys were looking at Mr Yates as if he’d dropped in from heaven, listening to him spellbound. And her father obviously thought he was a fine fellow.

  Annie supposed he was quite a cut above the young men roundabouts. It was his brown skin, she supposed, and the different way he had of speaking. There was an open-air look about him that set him apart. She passed him the last piece of bread.

  ‘Do you mean that your grandma was a real proper gypsy, Mr Yates?’

  Annie didn’t need to raise her head to know who had asked that question. Timmy wanted to know about everything. He had what his teacher called an ‘enquiring mind’, even at ten years old. Now his small face was puckered into a grave fascination.