The Travelling Man by Marie Joseph

love.’ Well, that was true enough, she thought, though his complexion was so swarthy you could be forgiven for thinking he had a touch of the tar brush in him.
    Not that she would use such a phrase to her daughter. Edith had once wanted to be a missionary going out to Africa to bring the word of Jesus to the black children. Edith never noticed the colour of a person’s skin. It was their souls that mattered.
    ‘I’ve never seen a black man,’ Grandma Morris had told her daughter once. ‘And neither have you.’
    But Edith had ignored her. The opportunity of being a missionary had long since come and gone. Now, with her mother totally bedfast Edith didn’t even have the chance to work full-time at weaving. The days were too long for her mother to be left alone, even though the neighbours were goodness itself. So for the past five years Edith had been a ‘sick’ worker, standing in for absentee weavers, waiting outside the mills some mornings for over an hour on the off-chance somebody failed to turn up. The old lady sighed. Being a burden was bad enough, but knowing you were one was worse.
    ‘It looks like our Edith has got taken on this morning, else she’d be back by now.’
    It was Annie’s turn to ignore her now. She was standing there at the foot of the bed staring at the wall as if she’d seen a vision.
    ‘Laurie has Romany blood in him. He could tell fortunes.
You
liked him, didn’t you?’
    ‘He was a right bobby-dazzler, love, and educated too. I asked him why he hadn’t settled down to a proper job, but he only laughed at me.’
    ‘He has to feel
free
!’ Annie’s face was transformed by her love. Laurie had been gone for two hours now and the need to talk about him was overwhelming. ‘He hated the mine. The dark and the heat hurt him here.’ She thumped her chest. ‘His father wanted him to go to college but it would have finished him off. He has to be able to open a door and walk away when the feeling of being stifled comes on. Nobody can tie him down. Nobody!’
    ‘And he’s coming back to marry you, love?’
    With a little rush Annie moved round to the side of the bed, sitting down on the counterpane and lowering her voice to a dramatic whisper.
    ‘We are already married, Grandma Morris. In our hearts. We love each other so much we made our vows, just as if we were in church. Promising to love each other for ever and ever, Amen. Oh yes, Laurie will be back for me.’
    She went through and got the heavy basket of washing from the back, walking as if there was air beneath her feet and not the oilcloth scrubbed by Edith every Friday night. Poor Edith, she was thinking, to be fifty and never known what it was to have been loved by a man. No wonder she was as sour as unsweetened rhubarb.
    Annie often left the front door wide open to the street while she did the ironing. Her mother had always stood on a cushion to save her feet from aching, so she stood on one too. She pressed a traycloth carefully on the right side then turned it over and ironed the wrong to bring up the lumpy splendour of Edith Morris’s French knots. Tears came to her eyes as she thought about Laurie going further away from her with every hour that passed. He was making for Bury first, he’d told her, because he had a friend there who would give him a bed for the night. Annie rolled up her sleeves to well above the elbow and fastened her hair back with Laurie’s blue ribbon. Then reached for a pillowcase fringed with Edith’s exquisite crochet-work.
    On his way home Bertram Thwaites stopped to catch his breath and saw Annie at the table ironing.
    ‘There’s a bit of a nip in the air today, Annie.’ He took a step inside. ‘Nights’ll be drawing in soon.’ He took off his billycock and wiped his bulging forehead with the back of his jacket sleeve. Drawing attention to the dents.
    ‘I reckon he fell on a pitchfork once,’ Annie had told her friend Janie Whittaker at school, and they’d giggled so much the teacher