The Travelling Man Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Marie Joseph was born in Lancashire and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. Before her marriage she was in the Civil Service. She now lives in Middlesex with her husband, a retired chartered engineer, and they have two married daughters and eight grandchildren.

  Marie Joseph began her writing career as a short-story writer and she now uses her Northern background to enrich her bestselling novels. Down-to-earth characters bring a vivid authenticity to her stories, which are written with both humour and poignancy.

  Her novel: A Better World Than This won the 1987 Romantic Novelist’s Association Major Award.

  ALSO BY MARIE JOSEPH

  RING A-ROSES

  MAGGIE CRAIG

  A LEAF IN THE WIND

  EMMA SPARROW

  GEMINI GIRLS

  THE LISTENING SILENCE

  LISA LOGAN

  THE CLOGGER’S CHILD

  POLLY PILGRIM

  A BETTER WORLD THAN THIS

  A WORLD APART

  PASSING STRANGERS

  Marie Joseph

  THE TRAVELLING MAN

  For Ali …

  1

  DOWN IN LONDON, Queen Victoria’s coffin, borne on a gun carriage and covered by the royal standard, was taken to the mausoleum at Frogmore. Londoners wept openly in the streets, and up in the industrial heart of Lancashire the Old Trouper, as the working man called her, was talked about with pride. For wasn’t she one of them in the way she had carried on fighting, signing her papers right up to the week before she died? They doubted if they’d ever see the likes of her again.

  It was the end of an era.

  It was 1901.

  At the back end of that year Jack Clancy told his daughter Annie about the lodger.

  ‘A lodger? Here?’ Her eyes almost popped out of their sockets. ‘Where is he going to sleep then? You’re never going to let him sleep in your room, are you, our Dad?’

  She could tell her father was in one of his blustering moods. He always blustered when he was in the wrong, especially when there wasn’t the drink in him. Annie watched him warily from one side of the square table in the front living-room of the terraced house. It was always as well to have the width of the table between them when her father was in one of his rages. Often the best thing to do was to scarper out the back way and hide up for a bit till he calmed down.

  But first she’d have a go at reasoning with him.

  ‘You know full well there’s only the two rooms upstairs – you in one, the five lads in the other – and me down here in the back scullery.’ She folded her arms across a sacking apron. ‘There’s no room in this house for a lodger, unless he’s going to sleep on the clothes-line!’

  For once Jack Clancy was being on his dignity. If he could have stood up straight fixing his daughter with a look, he would have done so. But after working underground for more than thirty years, crawling on his knees for a lot of the time, he would never straighten up properly again. His face was a map of criss-crossed blue scars, and the mark of an old injury stood out on his forehead like a bulging vein.

  The truth he would never admit to was that he regretted offering a stranger a place to doss down in the two-up, two-down house, though he would rather die than say so. He knew it had been the ale talking, but he wasn’t going to admit that either.

  ‘He can sleep on that.’ He jerked his head at the rag rug by the fire. ‘Laurie Yates has been a sailor, so he won’t be expecting to sleep in a four-poster with sheets and blankets. Anyroad, like I said, he’s coming, and when he gets taken on at the pit and starts bringing money in …’

  ‘You mean he hasn’t even got a job, our Dad! No job an’ no money? You mean I’ve got to feed him as well as all the others? Do you know what there is to last us till Friday? A measly rabbit, half a bag of oatmeal, some spuds sprouting their eyes out, and a piece of scrag end as thin as a sheet of tissue paper.’

  She was so mad she could feel tears warming the back of her eyes, but she wasn’t going to let them fall. Annie Clancy was no crier. ‘Crying never got the baby a new bonnet,’ she always told herself when things got too bad and somehow, since her mother’s death four years ago, she had managed, even on the money her father grudgingly tipped over to her. And now her eldest brother Georgie was twelve and working, things were beginning to look up.

  Annie was a good manager and she knew it. She could make a stew that stuck to your ribs out of a few bones, a handful of vegetables and a good scattering of barley. She knew how to simmer an ox-tail in the fire oven till the meat dropped from the bone as tender as butter, and she could roll oatcakes so thin you could see the graining on the table through them.

  Oh yes, she’d managed all right, even though there were times when she’d gone to bed so hungry she could have gnawed the table leg. She had seen to it that the boys never went to school barefoot; she had coped with the dirt her father and Georgie brought back from the pit.

  She wore a dark patterned cotton blouse that day, a long brown skirt, and two aprons, one of shiny black fent and the top one of sacking. Her hair was tucked up into a man’s flat cap, and her hands and wrists were the reddy-brown of potted meat. She was as thin as a picked chicken and her eyes, an unusually dark blue, were the eyes of someone who, while hoping for the best, more often got the worst.

  ‘There’s six of you!’ she was shouting now. ‘All lads. And now you tell me you’re fetching another one to live here!’

  Frustration and fury welled up in her throat, making her feel sick. She could hear herself yelling, she knew she was sounding as common as dirt and that her mother would have been ashamed of her; accepted she was making as much noise as Mrs Greenhalgh at the bottom of the street did when she was having a go at her daughter-in-law. Yet Annie was glad the door was open. She hoped everybody in the street was listening. Let them all crowd round the door and hear what she had to say, because she hadn’t finished yet, not by a long chalk she hadn’t.

  ‘No wonder me mother never got over the last one of us being a boy. She was sick and tired of listening to rough talk; sick of cooking stews that got gulped down in a minute, and tired out of having to do everything herself, without anybody stretching out a finger to help her. You even let her fetch the coal in from the back when she was expecting …’

  Annie knew she was going too far, but nothing could stop her now. In a strange way she was glorying in the sound of her raised voice, exulting in the fact that she was daring to speak her mind.

  ‘One more mucky face, one more pair of clogs under the table! You must think I’m doo-lally!’

  Totally beside herself, no longer in control of the words spilling from her mouth, Annie stared at the thick-set man across the table, infuriating her by remaining uncharacteristically silent. She lowered her voice to a fierce whisper:

  ‘An’ while we’re getting a few things straight, it wasn’t the consumption that took me mother off neither. It was malnutrition, our Dad. Starvation!’

  Jack Clancy took a menacing step forward, leaning on the table edge, gripping it with his hands. He could feel his throat swelling and hear blood pounding
in his head. He’d vowed after the last time when they’d had to bring the doctor to her, that he would never hit Annie again, no matter how much she provoked him. But what she’d just said … Good God Almighty, he’d be less than a man to let her get away with that. Some of the things she came out with would make even the Angel Gabriel spit.

  When he hit her she rocked back, clutching at the chair to save herself from falling. The stinging pain in her left ear made her eyes water, so that all she wanted to do was to rock backwards and forwards, moaning the pain away. But the white hot anger inside sustained her.

  As her father reached the door she was there, shouting after him as he walked away from her, hunch-shouldered down the cobbled street. Just like Mrs Greenhalgh at the bottom house, Annie stuck her chin out, put her hands on her hips and screamed at the top of her voice: ‘If that bloomin’ lodger comes in at our front door, then it’s me out the back, our Dad!’ She stepped out on to the uneven flagstones and shook both fists in the air. ‘I’m telling you! So think on. Think on!’

  Jack didn’t bother to turn round. He was used to his daughter’s ways. He could afford to bide his time, knowing she would calm down as quickly as she’d flared up. She was one on her own all right – had been from the day she was born. He turned the corner, hobnailed boots ringing on the flags. Annie was as different from the boys as chalk from cheese. Where they sulked or merely shrugged their shoulders, Annie yelled. Old Doctor Bradley had called her the strongest lad in the family, and by the left, he was right. It was as if a fire burned inside her, giving her the strength of a man. She could hump the coal in from the yard, or turn a flock mattress without catching her breath. Yet she wasn’t the size of two pennorth of copper. But he’d best her. He’d show her who was boss. He turned up his jacket collar against the wind which felt as if it was coming straight from Siberia.

  Jack Clancy’s father had brought his son over from Ireland to work on the farms around Ormskirk, but the minute he could get away Jack was down the mines, working alongside men who talked his language, doing a bit of wrestling in his spare time, playing pitch and toss on Sunday mornings instead of going to nine o’clock Mass. He had ordered the priest from his house on more than one occasion, and had managed to convince himself that all church-goers were hypocrites. His wife had been a Methodist. In Jack’s opinion the worst hypocrites of all.

  Instead of going back inside, Annie went two doors down to the house where Grandma Morris lay in bed in the front room; she had been a bedridden invalid for as long as anyone in the street could remember. All Annie knew was that the old woman had bad legs, but she was always working at something with her strong arms and hands – knitting, sewing, peeling potatoes, earning her keep as she often said. When Annie lifted the sneck on the front door and walked in, Grandma Morris put down the sheet she was hemming and took off the steel-rimmed glasses she wore on the very tip of her nose.

  Annie came straight to the point – there was no other way. Grandma Morris missed nothing that went on in the street, though she kept what she saw and heard to herself, never skitted about it or passed on a confidence. Nobody knew how she’d come to be called Grandma by everybody. There were certainly no grandchildren of her own, as her only daughter Edith was a spinster teacher of fifty summers who played the harmonium at Sunday School and said she had need of no other friend in her life but Jesus.

  Since growing older, Annie had begun to believe that Edith was a bit of a trial to her mother, though she understood how difficult it would be for the old lady to be even faintly nasty to the daughter who kept her so clean. Spotless, in fact.

  ‘I expect you heard me shouting after me dad?’ Annie stood at the foot of the bed. ‘You can’t have missed it with both our doors being open. I gave him a right tickin’ off.’

  Grandma Morris nodded towards the fire. ‘Put another of them big cobs on, love. It’s not time for Nextdoor to come in for a bit yet and there’s a real nip in the air today. No, don’t shut the door, love. The winter’ll be here soon enough, God knows.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘Well of course I heard you bawling your head off. I’m not that deaf. I reckon if they’d been handing out the medals for who could shout the loudest in this street, you’d win hands down. Mrs Greenhalgh down the bottom end would have to split her tonsils before she could yell as loud as that.’

  She knew that young Annie would rather die than tell about the clout she’d had, but the left side of her face was as crimson as a port wine stain, and tears still glistened on her eyelashes. If Grandma Morris had spoken aloud what she was thinking about Jack Clancy, the very air around her would have turned blue. The man was a boor and a bully but, to be fair to him, he was doing his best to fetch up six kids on his own since his wife died, so maybe there was some good in him. Though you’d need a search warrant to find it – you would ’n’ all.

  ‘Me dad wants us to have a lodger.’ Indignation flared Annie’s nostrils. ‘A bloomin’ lodger who hasn’t even got a job. A sailor!’ She clasped work-roughened hands round the brass knob at the foot of the bed. ‘I know me mother would have been put to shame to hear me behaving like that, but she’s dead and gone, and there’s only me. If I don’t stand up for meself I’m a gonner. Me dad would treat me like a doormat if I let him. An’ I know I shouldn’t be talking about him, calling him like this, but you don’t know how selfish he is, Grandma Morris.’

  The tears, held tight inside her, suddenly overflowed. ‘He still has the front bedroom all to himself, not caring a toss that three of the boys have to squash in a bed in the back, with the other two lying on a mattress on the floor. It’s a wonder me mother doesn’t come back and haunt him. You know how kind to everybody she was.’ A great sob burst from Annie’s throat. ‘I cry for her more now than when she’d just died. You liked her, I know.’

  ‘I’d have laid her out when she passed on if I could have got to your house, love. That’s how much I thought about her. They don’t grow them like your mother all that often.’

  Annie twisted away from the bed. ‘I know it’s a wicked thing to say, but why did she marry him, Grandma Morris? They’d nothing in common. Nothing!’

  ‘He married her,’ the old lady said, nodding her head mysteriously. ‘Don’t go making a big drama out of something you know nothing about. An’ don’t go working yourself up into a lather about your father, or giving him cheek at the top of your voice. Things’ll only go from bad to worse if you carry on like that.’

  It was no use. Annie had come to have her say, so there was no stopping her now. Who else could she talk to? Who else would listen? The shame of being hit made her cringe inside; each time it happened it left her feeling more diminished – yes, that was the word – diminished.

  ‘My father doesn’t like me! I stopped trying to make him love me a long time ago, but it’s come to me lately that he doesn’t even like me. He looks at me sometimes with such a terrible expression on his face. I’m not imagining it. There’s murder in his eyes some days.’ She gave a sob. ‘An’ it’s me birthday today, Grandma Morris. I’m seventeen today. It’s me birthday, and nobody knows!’

  Not for nothing was Grandma Morris known as ‘the peacemaker’. So many confidences had been poured out to her from the foot of her bed she could have set every single family in the street at each other’s throats if she’d been inclined to gossip. So, at the risk of sometimes verging on the side of hypocrisy, she would listen, swallow what she was really thinking, and soothe, smooth over wounded feelings, dispense wisdom from the bed set under the window in the front room of the small terraced house.

  She looked long and hard at Annie and told herself, not for the first time, that but for the clothes she was wearing Mary Clancy’s young lass could be taken for a lad. Not a vestige of hair showed beneath the floppy flat cap; the sleeves of the cotton blouse were pushed up to reveal Annie’s thin arms, ending in hands as red as if they’d been boiled in a bag. The small circular shawl she was wearing round her shoulders was crossed at the front and knotted at t
he back. Grandma Morris sighed. Annie didn’t take after her mother for looks, nowt was more certain. Mary Clancy had had hair as black as the soot from the chimney-back, and skin like the cream skimmed from the top of the milk. Annie’s mother, before she wasted away to nothing, had been a raving beauty, a woman to make men lust after her. No wonder her husband had seen to it that every year since he married her she was either expecting, nursing or burying a child.

  ‘When I was your age,’ she said carefully, ‘I remember thinking that anyone who tried to tell me what to do hated me. I was growing up, love, just like you’re growing up. I thought I knew best, better than anybody. How dare they try to tell me how I should think, or how to behave myself!’

  There was a question in Annie’s eyes, but it would never be asked. ‘Did your father hit you?’ it said. ‘If you dared to speak your mind, did he lay about you?’

  Nextdoor coming in at that very moment was a bit of a blessing, Grandma Morris thought. Annie almost knocked her over in her dash for the door.

  ‘That lass’s father was bog-Irish, and it’s coming out in her,’ Nextdoor said, rolling the blankets down to give the bed a bit of an airing while her neighbour was on the commode. ‘Mary Clancy thought herself a cut above, just because she served her time to millinery and dressmaking.’

  Grandma Morris said a diplomatic nothing. It never mattered whether you answered Nextdoor or not. She was always far too busy listening to herself, in any case.

  ‘Did you know they’ve got bugs across the street? I’ve seen two men going in this morning with elastic bands round their trouser bottoms to stop the flecks crawling up their legs.’ Nextdoor was giving the flock mattress a good pawing to even out the lumps. ‘One thing about young Annie. She does her best to keep the place clean. Did you hear her creating merry ’ell a bit since? Her mother’ll be turning in her grave if she was listening.’

  ‘I’ve finished, thank you,’ Grandma Morris said. In a voice as quietly dignified as circumstances would allow.