The Travelling Man

by Marie Joseph

  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?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Then look after him well, Annie Clancy. You hear me?’ With a flick of her whip Margot urged the pony on, leaving Annie looking after her spellbound.

  Plain Mrs Gray she might be. Not Lady Gray as she deserved to be, but Annie could recognise gentry when she saw it. In her dress made up of two different plaids, with a small velvet hat pinned to her upswept dark hair, she had looked every inch a Duchess. The encounter was the closest Annie had ever been to the aristocracy, and she felt suitably overawed. Manners, breeding, all were there, along with the dignity on which her mother had set such store.

  ‘We never saw anybody like her down our street,’ she told Clara when she went inside. ‘She spoke to me just like she was an ordinary person.’

  ‘I’m not going to last long,’ Clara said.

  ‘What’s puzzling me is how she got her hair to stick up at the back of her hat like that. It looked as if it had been brushed over a pin cushion. Nobody could have hair that thick. Biddy told me that she’d once worked for a titled lady who sat for an hour every morning having her hair brushed and pinned up. Fancy having a maid to brush your hair! Biddy said she …’

  ‘I keep getting this numb feeling in my hands and feet,’ said Clara. ‘Feel at my fingers, Annie. It’s the same with my toes. I’m dying inch by inch.’

  Annie obliged, rubbing the cold hands between her own, taking off Clara’s slippers and doing the same to her thin, blue-veined feet.

  She couldn’t get the sight of Mrs Gray out of her mind. All that splendour, all that colour! Even the pony looked as if it had been polished up with a silk scarf. And the blues and greens of the plaid dress, a misty blue and a muted green. Clara had said all Mrs Gray’s dresses came from Paris, and that she had a maid to help her on with her clothes.

  ‘And nothing wrong with her neither?’ Annie had cried.

  ‘It’s not true that we’re all equal in the sight of God,’ she told Clara now, as she dealt with one icy-cold foot then the other. ‘Mrs Gray is more equal than any of us. I can’t get over her. I really can’t.’

  ‘It’s a sign that you’re on your way out when your extremes go numb,’ said Clara. ‘I won’t see Christmas.’

  Margot Gray nurtured a guilty disappointment in her step-daughters. Her husband’s first wife had possessed an hour-glass figure and a cameo-like prettiness, but by some unfortunate distribution of genes, both Dorothea and Abigail resembled their father, even to the florid face, hawk-like nose and thick-set body. Puddings, Margot considered them to be, with high fashion wasted on them. Their slow minds were attuned to horses, horses, horses and even, God help them, Harry’s fine herd of pigs.

  Her observant eye had taken in the slimness of Annie’s waist and the voluptuous swell of her breasts in the too tight dress. Given the right clothes and the right accent, of course, Adam’s waif and stray could have every eligible bachelor for miles hovering on the doorstep.

  The hair could be a problem, though. Margot clearly remembered red-haired children being left to live out their days hidden away in workhouses because of the colour of their hair. She touched her own hair. God alone knew what colour hers would be without its weekly rinse of cold strong tea. She leaned closer to the tripled mirror on her dressing-table, pushing at the front of her hair, searching for any sign of greyness at the roots. The gardener’s girl would almost certainly go a pure white if she lived to be old. Red-haired women were lucky in that way. Now she, if she let hers go the way nature intended, would be a dirty battleship grey. She shuddered.

  Annie Clancy had intrigued her. Margot never listened to servants’ gossip, naturally, but according to Dorothea they were saying down in the kitchen that the gardener’s girl had been found wandering the roads without a possession to her name. Thrown out by a hill farmer who had got her pregnant and abandoned her.

  Margot plucked out a suspect hair. But if that were true where was the baby? How had Adam got his puritanical wife to accept a fallen girl living in the cottage? It was all a great mystery.

  Margot sighed. Middle-age was a bore. Old age she refused to contemplate. She lifted her chin and slapped it hard with the backs of her hands, wincing at the incipient double chin.

  It would be interesting to know where young Annie Clancy had come from. Her accent had Margot puzzled. There was a refinement about it that conflicted with another story she’d heard that Annie was a product of the workhouse.

  Thinking about the workhouse reminded her. What Margot saw as ‘the servant problem’ was a constant worry. She had been advised to write to the vicar’s wife to ask if she knew of any village girl who would be willing to live in. A much more acceptable way of solving ‘the servant problem’ than applying direct to the nearest workhouse.

  Margot couldn’t bear the thought that she was getting wrinkles round her mouth, but the mirror never lied. Maybe if she did her lip stretching exercises more often she could keep them at bay.

  ‘Ee aw, ee aw, ee aw,’ she said, doing them now.

  She suddenly stopped in mid-stretch. If the gardener’s girl hadn’t come from the workhouse, why had she been running away? With nothing but the clothes she stood up in, according to one tale.

  It was better than a story in one of the weekly magazines her parlour maid liked to read.

  Biddy Baker missed Annie a lot.

  She couldn’t get over Annie leaving like that without saying a proper goodbye. Nothing in the house was quite the same somehow with no one to have a bit of a laugh with. Mr Armstrong was out all the hours that God sent, coming back cold and wet most days, slamming the door of his den behind him and forgetting to go to bed some nights, according to Mrs Martindale.

  The old woman was a flamin’ pain in the neck, always kow-towing to the animal doctor, fawning on him till his temper flared. Once or twice Biddy had wondered aloud how Annie Clancy was faring, only to have her head bitten off as if she’d said something too rude to repeat.

  Biddy had made a lovely story up in her head. It went like this:

  Annie Clancy turned up at the house one day dressed to kill, wearing a fur hat, a fur muff and kid gloves with a ribbon-trimmed green velvet dress. It turned out that down in London, in an antique shop, a locket had been found containing a silken strand of bright red hair. On the back of the locket was an inscription giving the name of a man related to royalty. The antique dealer had traced him and it had all come out that Annie was the daughter of the man’s mistress. On his deathbed the old man had whispered a Lancashire address, and through this Annie had eventually been traced. No further proof was needed when the hair in the locket was matched to Annie’s hair, and from then on she was able to lead a life of luxury with her own carriage and servants to tend her every whim.

  Biddy had always felt that Annie was a cut above herself and Mrs Martindale. She felt no rancour about this. Breeding would out any old day. Look how Mr Armstrong had taken to her, always teasing and talking with her, just as if he knew that deep down the pair of them came out of the same drawer. He’d never once asked Biddy to sit with him in his room, driving old Nelli
e mad. Biddy could quite see why. She hadn’t a ladylike bone in her body – her own mother was always telling her that. ‘You’d think you’d been dragged up instead of fetched up,’ she was always saying.

  Maybe if the story came true and Annie did turn up at the door swathed in velvet and fur, Mr Armstrong would take one look and fall madly in love with her. Seeing her for the first time as the aristocratic personage she really was. Personage … Biddy liked the sound of that word a lot. Mrs Martindale was a person. Biddy was a person. But Annie was a personage. Definitely.

  One warm day when skylarks were singing high above the fields, a fox got into the outhouse and bit the heads off a newborn litter of kittens. The animal doctor sat up for two nights running, trying to nurse the grieving mother cat back to a semblance of normality.

  Biddy thought he looked shocking and said so. ‘He’s not been the same since Annie Clancy went,’ she said unwisely. ‘I think he misses her. They were just getting really thick when she went.’

  ‘Getting thick?’ Nellie’s neck flushed up like a scald. ‘What an expression! You’re beginning to talk like those magazines you read.’

  ‘I might go and see Annie when I have my weekend off.’ Biddy spread a layer of jam on a slice of bread. ‘I’d like to know how she’s getting on.’

  ‘She’s not at home,’ Nellie said too quickly.

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.’

  All at once Nellie made a snap decision. She knew Biddy Baker. The stupid girl would make a mystery out of nothing. Once she got her teeth into anything she never let go. Wiser to shut her up once and for all.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this …’ Biddy sat up straight, both ears flapping. ‘… but the truth is that Annie blotted her copy book good and proper the night before she left. That was why she went in such a hurry without saying a decent goodbye.’

  ‘What did she do?’ Biddy held her breath, hoping for the worst. ‘She was in Mr Armstrong’s room till late, wasn’t she?’