The Travelling Man Read Free Page B

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 sea.’
    ‘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