Sadler's Birthday Page 11

  He’d tried to hide until the agent had gone. He’d taken the dog and wandered out to where he stood now. But half an hour later, just as he was beginning to get cold, the young man had come striding towards him.

  ‘Hallo again, Sir.’

  Sadler nodded.

  ‘Mind if I have a word before I go?’

  ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘It’s a very fine property. Been in the family long?’

  ‘Not my family. I used to work here, that’s all.’

  The young man coughed. ‘But you are the owner?’

  ‘Yes, it’s mine now.’

  ‘And you’re not sure you want to sell?’

  ‘I know I don’t want to sell!’

  ‘No, I see. Well, that’s a shame really. Of course I’d have to do a thorough survey before I could give you an accurate figure, but I’d say you’d get fifty or sixty for it.’

  Sadler laughed. ‘There’s probably less days left in me than that!’

  ‘Oh come on, Sir.’

  ‘I’m not that stupid, either. What good’s money in the bank if you’ve got no home?’

  ‘You could buy a smaller place.’

  ‘For dying in?’

  He coughed again. ‘No, well fine. Well, I’m sorry to have taken up your time. Perhaps you’ll think about it, though. I know a couple of people who might be interested.’

  And suddenly Sadler was angry. So cocksure, the agent was. His car and him – both anti-social pieces of machinery and Sadler wanted them gone.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he blurted out, ‘you won’t get me out, Sonny! I’m rooted – see!’ He drove his stick into the ground. ‘And I’m not budging. So drive your nice car up to London and go and pester the life out of some old thing in Barnes or Islington or wherever it is you people make your profits, but you leave me alone!’

  He’d felt ashamed, but only a little, as the young man strode obediently away. Then he sat down. The pain of his anger had made him feel sick.

  Sadler shivered. You couldn’t stand still for long, in spite of the sun, without feeling cold. Wander on then, going nowhere as usual, unless perhaps to see the show the crocuses were putting on. He looked round for the dog but couldn’t see him. Always a difficult moment, that, because the dog had no name he could call. Sadler spat, moistened his lips ready for a whistle, when he saw the dog no more than a few yards from him, watching him.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. And the dog got up, a bit shakily, wagging the tuft and steering himself carefully through the long grass. ‘We’ll go and look at the flowers.’

  Years ago, the gardeners had planted crocuses the whole length of the drive. Wren used to say they were his two favourite colours – purple and yellow. And people even wandered up from the village to steal a look at their brief flowering. Now there were only a few clumps, a patch here and there often hidden by the new year’s growth of weeds.

  ‘Aren’t they a picture?’ said a voice in Sadler’s ear. It was Mrs Moore with her coat on, ready to scuttle off home. Sadler was disappointed.

  ‘You didn’t stay long today, Mrs Moore.’

  ‘It’s gone ten, Mr Sadler. And I promised my sister …’

  ‘Oh well. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Not tomorrow, Sir. Tomorrow’s Sunday.’

  ‘Is it? I lose track these days.’

  ‘Yes. The Day of Rest, and I can’t say I’m not thankful for it.’

  Sadler nodded.

  ‘Oh and I meant to tell you, Sir, the Reverend Chapman would like to call on you about tea-time, if that would be convenient.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll be going anywhere.’

  And then she was off. Little hasty steps, one two, one two, one two in her neat brown shoes. One two, one two, one two, one two, gone.

  Imagine, Sadler thought, loving her. He pitied the man who could shoulder that burden, who’d have his soul pecked at day after day, wake with her creased elbow in his shoulder, spend his love in a body that had resisted and resisted and turned away thankfully to God. Better to be alone, really, than watched by that accusing eye. And yet what if she never came back, if no one came? What if they just left him there with the dust and dirt and his memories?

  He felt very tired. ‘We’ve done enough walking,’ he said to the dog, ‘let’s go back.’ And he was glad when he stepped into the warm kitchen, all its surfaces tidy and scrubbed now, even the teapot washed up and put away. He took off his boots and hung his coat up, but forgot the woolly scarf dangling round his neck. The dog went straight to its place by the Aga and lay down thankfully. Too old it was really to go for walks, its little legs too stiff at the joints.

  ‘I know,’ said Sadler, ‘I know. But don’t you dare die.’

  He sat down at the kitchen table, in a familiar attitude, resting his arms on it. There was an old wireless, hideous sack of a thing squatting on top of the fridge, but still obediently sending out crackly versions of the BBC’s tidings, and Sadler thought he might switch it on. There weren’t many of the songs they sang these days that he liked, but now and then one stuck in his head and humming it would cheer him up. But he only remembered them if they amused him and the last one had been more than two years ago:

  Going up to the Spirit in the Sky,

  That’s where I go when I die,

  When I die and they lay me to rest

  Gonna go to the place that’s the best!

  He’d made Mrs Moore listen to the words of this song one morning, he chuckling, she sour, glowering into her tea.

  ‘It’s a good song, isn’t it, Mrs Moore?’

  ‘I’ve never cared for pops and that.’

  ‘Don’t you like the words, though?’

  ‘Well, they’re all speaking American, aren’t they? You can’t understand them half the time.’

  ‘I quite like that song.’

  ‘Too jerky for me.’

  Mrs Moore had never been more certain about anything than that the singer of the song would never get to heaven, and Sadler had thought, Lord, what an arrogance there seems to be in people who think God loves them. Like members of a club. Certain habits, they said, excluded you. Forgetting, though, that Jesus kept company with publicans and sinners, and nowadays, Sadler had laughingly suggested, it’d be republicans and singers, wouldn’t it? But not a ghost of a smile in her cheek, merely reproach in her eyes for his feeble joke and a few words spat out with venom: ‘You ought to go to church!’

  He had, regularly, long ago. While in the service of Milord, the servants all went to church. Her ladyship expected it, would glance behind her, counting heads as the Reverend Stooks and his choir of four (five occasionally with the addition of Charlie Stooks, the vicar’s youngest son, red in the face and smiling like a nervous bride) measured out the fifteen paces to the altar steps. Right at the back, Cook always wanted to clap but restrained herself by adjusting her hatpins instead.

  That church, smelling of the dusty seeds that filled the hassocks, was always full on a Sunday morning, often so crammed with people that Jack was squeezed up tight against his mother. In the shelter of her arm, he’d looked up at the incredible blue just behind Christ’s head on the window, found it like no other blue he’d ever seen. Where, he wanted to ask her – in what mysterious corner of his being – had the man who made the window discovered it? In Art at school he’d striven unsuccessfully to find that blue, week after week. Something more beautiful than the sky and yet containing the sky: his sky.

  Jack had quite a good voice, so Mrs Dean said, and he’d been proud enough of it to sing out when the congregation shuffled to its feet for a hymn. And he secretly longed to come walking down the nave with the choir, envied the ludicrous Charlie Stooks his lace ruff. He didn’t remember ever thinking about God. And if God had been there in those crowded pews, in those facets of blue, He had disappeared after that.

  ‘No insistence is made here,’ Keynes told Sadler, ‘on the servants attending worship. Everyone does as they please, provided they’r
e not required for domestic duty at that time on a Sunday. I myself am not a churchgoing man.’

  So church was forgotten. ‘I myself,’ it seemed the pigeons had cooed one by one, ‘am not a churchgoing, am not a churchgoing, am not a churchgoing girl.’ Sadler wondered if they stayed away to please Keynes.

  ‘Why don’t you go to church, Mary?’ he’d asked her one Sunday.

  ‘Church?’ she said, ‘whatever next!’

  So that was it, then. Here, you weren’t expected to go and stand under a blue window. God was gone. You still said a prayer each night that began ‘God bless Ma’, but you never thought about the God part of it any more.

  Until one day in 1930 He summoned you again. He brought you back to His door after all that time. A spring day in April, a breeze like a child’s breath. And there you stood, obedient as a child, and because someone had told you all that while ago that God is Love, ashamed, mortally ashamed of your anger. Summoned by letter. A shaky, almost indecipherable hand, Milady’s, nearing her seventy-ninth year and widowed now, speaking of her sorrow, her real sorrow ‘because I’d grown so fond of Annie your dear Mother, who has been such a loyal servant to me these past years’, and it was God who passed back into your head, the friend you’d abandoned when you were young and who now exacted a price for your disloyalty.

  There was laurel by the cemetery gate. You touched one of the leaves, rubbed it between finger and thumb as you waited for the people to arrive. You stood and waited and waited and no one came. Then you went inside and you looked up at the fretted blue behind Christ’s head on the window and you wept. Ghastly, uncontrollable, convulsive sobs that made you retch, and you knelt down, not because you wanted to kneel to God, but because you couldn’t stand up, because you had to hold on to something, hearing, feeling nothing but the grief that swelled and heaved inside you. Then there was a cold, soft touch on your shoulder, a touch you knew was meant to heal and comfort, but which only made you aware of your shame, silenced you, but left your body rocking back and forth, back and forth, unable to be still, but searching now somewhere for a name, the name of the hand that touched it, aware that there was a time when it would have recognized that hand, known that name. And little by little, you brought yourself back to stillness, the hand stayed on your shoulder and in your head you said to it, give me time, stay and comfort me till I can look up and see your face, because I know that when I look up I’ll know your face, even though I haven’t seen it for so long and then I’ll remember … But you had remembered the name: Stooks. You’d conjured it from somewhere, found it through your feeble fumblings in absolute darkness and run to it as towards a tiny prick of light. Stooks. And with the name came the remembrance of a face. You saw it clearly now, just as it used to be, could even picture it standing above you and smiling. Your body was still now, still and silent and light was seeping back under your eyelids. You reached out a hand and held on to the hard wood of the back of the pew and you turned your face as you felt the hand lift off your back and looked up. And you saw a stranger.

  Sadler was staring at the wire meshing on the front of the old wireless. His eyes had fixed themselves on to this square, following intently the journeying of the brown threads that had woven it. His eyes were dry and smarting so he closed them. He began wondering why he’d been looking at the wireless, and then he remembered that he’d been going to turn it on. Good idea to turn it on, he thought now. Far better to listen to a song than to all the snatches of sound he’d been drubbing up in his head.

  V

  ‘Cor!’ Tom said.

  Wren had been into town, driving Madge who wanted to do some shopping and he’d returned with Tom’s Champion, as promised.

  ‘Thanks, Mr Wren.’

  ‘Last one in the shop.’

  ‘Cor. Was it?’

  ‘Lucky to get it. I reckon that might have gone if I’d been a bit later.’

  ‘I’m glad you got it.’

  ‘Good, is it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can’t remember what I read when I was a lad.’

  ‘Comics, didn’t you?’

  ‘I can’t remember anything like that.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Books, I suppose, just books.’

  ‘My Ma says no one’s got time for books, ’cos of the war.’

  ‘That’s probably true, Tom. There must be a lot of things people don’t have time for now.’

  ‘Why aren’t you in the war, Mr Wren?’

  ‘Too old, son, too old to fight.’

  Here was a straight answer, one Tom understood. Rare, though, in the life he now led, which seemed to be full of confusions, of questions that went unanswered. At home, there’d been his Ma to ask about things and he’d always believed in the truth of her answers, never once questioned it. And when there wasn’t his Ma, there was Martha-Ann, who always started her answers with a reassuring, ‘Well, Tommy, you know what I’d say to that?’ And when there wasn’t Martha-Ann, there was an ‘auntie’ of some shape or colour. All of which had led Tom to believe that only women knew the truth about things, that in them resided most of the world’s wisdom. But Vera had disappointed him. So busy, she always seemed to be – her thin arms sinewy from the unceasing activity, backwards and forwards with the rolling pin, round and round with the spoon – that questions seemed to get in her way and she’d trip over them. Like on the afternoon, during Tom’s first week, when, sitting in the kitchen watching her, he’d felt homesick and said:

  ‘’Ow long am I staying ’ere, Vera?’

  ‘What, love?’

  She was dusting a pie with sugar. She’d made a flower out of the bits of pastry left over and stuck it on the top.

  ‘How long am I staying ’ere?’

  ‘Rest of your life, I wouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What, duck?’

  She wasn’t listening. She was carrying her pie to the oven.

  ‘Why?’

  She was holding the pie in one hand, opening the oven door with the other. But then, just as she was about to answer him, she bumped her pie with the oven door and the flower fell off on to the floor.

  ‘Flamin’ ’ell!’

  ‘Why, Vera?’

  ‘Cos Mr ’itler sez you must.’

  ‘’E never …’

  ‘Ask no questions and get told no flippin’ lies, duck.’

  And that was really disappointing. Schoolmasters, he’d noticed, often slithered round questions by asking you one back, but women usually told you something you could believe in.

  Tom opened his Champion as soon as Wren had gone. He’d been sitting on his bed most of the afternoon, waiting for it. The last one he’d seen had been three weeks ago and it was in that issue they’d announced a new adventure series with a new hero, Rockfist Rogan of the RAF. He’d missed two weeks. Two Fridays had come and gone and he and Rockfist were still unacquainted. But now, on page five, there he was!

  Biff! Thud! Biff!

  ‘Gosh Rockfist, I don’t know how you’ve got the energy to hit that punch bag around!’

  Flight Lieutenant Rogan of the Royal Air Force, known to his pals as Rockfist because of his boxing prowess, grinned at Curly Hooper and continued his vigorous punching.

  He ducked, weaved, dodged on his toes, hurling punches at the spinning bag as if he meant to batter it to bits.

  Thud! Biff! Thud!

  Rockfist’s blows set the bag swinging wildly.

  At that moment, the door opened and a staff officer stepped in, walking unsuspectingly into the path of the flying bag.

  The full weight of the bag took him in the chest.

  ‘Oof!’

  ‘Wow!’

  The newcomer was flung back against the wall. Rockfist stood rooted to the spot in dismay.

  ‘Oh gosh —’ he began.

  The bag was swinging back. Rockfist was too surprised to notice it. It swept up and clonked him on the chin.

  ‘Ugh!’ he cried, and hit the f
loor with a thump.

  Tom laughed. And an hour later he had read it all. Not just the story about Rockfist Rogan. He’d been on tour with the Roving Rovers, Fireworks Flynn the Wizard Sports Master had captured a mystery sharpshooter, Colwyn Dane, Mark Grimshaw’s famous ’tec, had solved the Riddle of the Vanished Speedster and the Mantamer from Muskrat had won again. Everything was right in the world of Champion. So Tom had gone to sleep on his bed and the Champion had fallen on to the floor. His tea-time had come and gone and Vera, having one of her bad days, had sent Sadler off in search of him.

  ‘Tea’s all ready, Mr Sadler, but I won’t ’ave it sitting on the table till dinner-time. He can go without.’

  Sadler went up to the coconut matting landing. Tom’s room was two doors along from his own, smaller than his, but with the same view over the orchard from its high window. There were no pictures in it, only a little embroidered motto: Friday’s child is full of grace.

  ‘I wasn’t born on a Friday,’ Tom had remarked.

  ‘What day were you born on, Tom?’

  ‘Dunno. Not a Friday.’

  Sadler knocked before going into Tom’s room. The boy was entitled to the illusion that this at least belonged to him and that he had some rights over it. But there was no sound at all from inside it, so Sadler opened the door quietly and went in. Tom was lying on his back with his fist above his head.

  ‘Tom,’ Sadler whispered. But he didn’t stir.

  Sadler looked at him and thought, I could reach out and touch him and he wouldn’t know. Then he saw Tom’s Champion lying on the floor and bent down and picked it up. The word CATAPULTS in large letters in an advertisement box caught his attention. A special offer, it said, for four and ninepence, carriage paid. ‘Polished aluminium fork with wide spread, square quarter-inch elastic. Leather sling. State age when ordering.’ Sadler had always been able to file things in his memory, hadn’t needed to write everything down like the Colonel. So he noted the address and the sum of four and ninepence.