The Travelling Man by Marie Joseph Read Free Book Online Page B

together, Laurie. Like we were standing together in church.’
    ‘I promise to marry you,’ he said through clenched teeth.
    ‘I promise to make you a good wife,’ Annie whispered, feeling her heart contract with love. ‘For ever and ever, Amen. An’ you’ll come back for me?’
    ‘I’ll come back for you. I promise.’ The school must have loosed. Laurie could hear the clatter of clogs in the street outside. ‘Amen,’ he said with fervour. ‘In the sight of God,’ he added. For good measure.
    ‘An’ you won’t forget me?’
    ‘I’ll
never
forget one single word we’ve said.’
    Firmly he put her from him.
    As soon as her father and George had gone off to work the next morning Annie packed a hunk of bread and a nice thick slice of potted meat for Laurie to take with him.
    ‘To put you on,’ she told him, ‘till you get well on your way.’ She added an apple, first wiping it carefully down the front of her blouse. ‘Your clean socks are in your sack, and a starched white collar. In case you have to go in front of an interviewing body to get taken on.’
    She was behaving like a wife already. So trusting, so naîve, so young, Laurie couldn’t get out and away quick enough. He was inordinately relieved when Timmy came downstairs complaining of the toothache, crouching down between them on the rug, holding a rag to the fire then pressing it against his cheek. Eyeing them up, taking all in.
    ‘Will you write to me often?’ Annie stood on the step with the door closed behind her, dry-eyed and outwardly composed.
    ‘Better not, love. Your dad would be bound to find out, then there’d be hell to pay.’ He risked touching her cheek, only to find his hand caught as she turned her lips to kiss his fingers. ‘I won’t be responsible for him hitting you.’
    ‘He will never hit me again, Laurie.’ Her eyes were very bright. ‘Now that I have you loving me, there’s no need for me to keep on trying to make
him
love me. I’m not afraid of him now, so write to me when you can. There’s nothing he can do to hurt me now.’
    Laurie touched a finger to his forehead, turned and walked away, leaving her standing there sending up a silent prayer that God would keep him safe and bring him back to her. He remembered to stop at the bottom of the sloping street to turn and wave.
    Annie went inside, heart bursting with love, to minister to Timmy’s tooth by pressing a piece of cotton soaked in oil of cloves against it.
    Grandma Morris from two doors down had had a bad night, but at first light when Laurie Yates went past her window she was sitting up in bed with a pillow underneath her knees to ease the grinding pain.
    ‘Yon lodger’s just got on his way,’ she told her daughter. Edith was running about like a scalded cat getting her mother settled and spotless before she went off to work. ‘He’s a fine looking man.’
    Edith didn’t hold with men and never had. Her mother had stopped wishing she would find someone to marry a long time ago. Always wanting to best men, take them down a peg, that was Edith. Look at her now, getting a dish of cowheels into the side oven and shoving the nigget into place so it would cook slow, when all the time her mother would have made do with a bowl of the leek and potato soup Edith had made last night.
    ‘The Clancys’ lodger?’ Edith sniffed. ‘I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole.’
    ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ her mother thought, with uncharacteristic bile.
    ‘There’s an understanding between us,’ Annie confided when she came round to collect the Morris’s washing, already folded and graded into whites and coloureds by Edith. ‘It’s a secret, a deadly secret, but by this time next year I could be married. Laurie is going to sea to save as much money as he can then he’s coming back for me.’
    ‘Very nice too,’ the old lady said, not believing a word of it. ‘He’s a fine looking man,