Read Online The Travelling Man by Marie Joseph - Free Book Online

Christmas, in the hour before the boys were up, Annie made up her mind to kill herself.
    There was no choice.
    She crouched over the fire coaxing it to a good blaze so that she could carry a shovelful of coal through to heat the water already in the copper. But when she got it there the iron door was sticking so that, in struggling to open it, she almost dropped her fiery burden on to her feet.
    She knew she was going to be sick again, heaving and retching over the slopstone with nothing to get rid of by now but a thin white froth. Silently she rocked herself backwards and forwards, her face pinched with anguish. It wouldn’t be long before her father cottoned on to what was wrong with her and when he did … when he did she was
dead
. It wouldn’t be any use trying to tell him that Laurie had promised to marry her, that they were already married in the sight of God.
    Annie straightened up from the slopstone, turned on the tap and as she did so it was as though the maggots in her head swelled so much they threatened to burst her head open, like a ripe pomegranate.
    She ran outside into the yard and when she banged her head against the blackened wall she felt no pain at first. It was only when she went back inside that she felt a trickle of blood down her face.
    ‘There’s something sadly wrong with young Annie.’
    Edith Morris was checking over the week’s washing before storing it away in lavender-scented drawers.
    ‘She’s not herself,’ she told her mother. ‘She just took the money tonight and went.’
    ‘I’d just nodded off,’ the old lady said. ‘She wouldn’t want to wake me, and you were busy making the cocoa.’ She stretched out her hand for a cup. ‘Young Annie’s not been right since that lodger of theirs went away. She talked daft to me about him coming back to marry her.’
    ‘You never said.’
    ‘It was private.’
    ‘Well, why are you telling me now?’
    They stared at each other over the rims of their cocoa cups. Both of them doing rapid sums in their heads.
    ‘She’s put a bit of weight on,’ Edith said.
    ‘She’s no fatter in the face.’
    ‘No, not in the
face
.’
    ‘Oh, my God!’ Grandma Morris said in her head. Not aloud because Edith would have accused her of blaspheming.
    Annie had taken to wearing the flat cap again, bundling her hair up into it, not caring a toss how she looked.
    Early January brought a frost so hard that she brought the sheets and towels in off the line as stiff as planks. Even a handful of salt in the rinsing water, supposed to stop them freezing, had no effect.
    By now the waist-band on her skirt was a long way off meeting, so she used a big nappy pin she found in a drawer, and wore her small shawl tied loosely. She had stopped praying to God to make things right, and she no longer thought up ways of killing herself. The frantic never-ending worry had taken her strength, sapped her spirit, and the only way she could get through the days was to divide them into hours, living each one from one dragging minute to the next.
    She stood at the mangle, feet well apart, purposefully feeding treble thickness sheets through the wooden rollers, straining at the big iron wheel till every muscle in her body ached. But nothing happened. She forced herself to jump from halfway up the stairs, landing heavily, and she worked at her wash-tubs with the posser till the sweat stood out on her forehead.
    It was strange how the mind worked, she told herself, remembering how her mother had done all these things. ‘My poor, poor little mother …’ Annie conjured her up, small and gentle, and remembered that in that gentleness lay a lot of strength. She would have known what to do. Somehow they would have faced up to this terrible, unbelievable thing together.
    ‘Help me, Mam …’ Annie closed her eyes and put her hands together. ‘Tell me what to do. Send me a sign showing me what to do.’
    When the knock came at the door she jumped. When she opened the door and saw