Sadler's Birthday Read online

  Madge sat up.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said suddenly, to banish her tears, ‘if I’d had any children, what on earth they’d make of me?’

  It seemed to revive her spirits to talk to him, to remember aloud. It was as if she were reading something she’d written long ago, long ago dismissed as trash, and then found herself surprised by how good it seemed to be. She had lived, she was trying to convince herself, there had been moments of joy and pain, odd flashes of understanding. ‘The trouble with people like me,’ she’d say, ‘is we’re too selfish. It’s very difficult to feel compassion for selfish people.’

  Sadler was still at the window, although the blue car had been gone some minutes. Perhaps, he now decided, it had been the vicar; it was like him to pay a visit just to show off his new car, if he had one. Somehow, the whole idea of vicars driving around in cars was amusing. The word of God passed, in Sadler’s mind, only along a stretch of dusty road where his Bible illustrator had drawn St Paul, white-robed and barefooted on his way to Tarsus or somewhere. The idea that the same message now toured Britain in a Vauxhall Viva was hilarious, and Sadler laughed.

  Then he went upstairs, forgetting about the key he’d been looking for, suddenly very tired and longing to sleep. His room was neat, the bed made, the clothes put away, everything tidy and very cold. He turned on the electric fire and clambered into bed. In minutes he was asleep.

  Waking, hearing the rain. Then walking downstairs, aware of an unfamiliar voice coming from the servants’ hall. Stop and listen. The voice is familiar and yet the name he tries to put to it won’t come. Stand very still, listening. The voice is deep, talks with extraordinary smoothness. And then it comes. Of course: Richard Dimbleby.

  Eight o’clock in the morning, but the servants’ hall is in total darkness, not a chink of light, only the blue flickering screen and in the opposite corner the red pinprick that is Vera’s cigarette.

  ‘It’s a bit loud, Vera.’

  ‘What, love?’

  ‘The TV. Do you need it so loud?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to miss nothing. Got ter ’ear it in the kitchen.’

  ‘You’re not in the kitchen.’

  ‘All right, dear, turn it down if you want to.’

  Dimbleby’s voice quietens, its smoothness now all the more noticeable. The cameras make a jerky progress down the Mall, glistening wet under wind buffeted trees, a grey sheet of water between steep banks of hard seats, tier upon tier of them. Vera shivers.

  ‘Look at them, poor ducks.’

  ‘Duck’s the word, isn’t it?’

  Rows of people huddled in groups under umbrellas and groundsheets, wearing hats and macs of all description. An extraordinary sight. Countless hundreds of people sitting round-shouldered, staring at nothing, persecuted by the rain.

  ‘And in June …’ Vera comments, ‘you’d have thought in June …’

  The jolting image is gone. Now in the leaky shelter of wood and scaffolding, a family, white faced, stares out, caught by a roving camera, and one by one Mum and Dad and a couple of young lads bring out little flags to wave. The boys are bundled together in an old eiderdown, can hardly get their Union Jacks out from under it.

  ‘Look at that,’ says Vera. ‘Been there all night, poor little mites.’

  ‘The Colonel won’t like the rain,’ remarked Sadler.

  ‘Oh lor!’

  ‘Maybe they’re protected, are they, the more expensive stands?’

  ‘Like as not I’d say.’

  ‘I wonder—’

  ‘I know what you was going ter say, you wonder if we’ll catch a glimpse of them.’

  A cheer goes up. At last, for the waiting thousands something begins to move down the Mall, at last some meat for Dimbleby as a lone dust cart cleaning the route trundles into sight. The cheer passes from stand to stand as the cart makes its slow procession. Vera claps. The two men riding on the cart appear to acknowledge her with a grin.

  Two hours at least before anything leaves the palace, thought Sadler, and in the meantime we’ll watch the watchers. There’ll be stories how this and that family have been camping for days to get a front row seat: ‘I told the kiddies,’ some rain-drenched Dad will announce to a rain-drenched BBC man, ‘I said you’ll come camping in the rain for a month if we tell you to. There’ll be nothing like this again, not in my lifetime, maybe not in yours, who can say? What’s discomfort, mate, compared to that? You won’t see nothin’ in life if you can’t abide a bit of discomfort.’

  Here in the house, they’ll sit all day in the dark in the servants’ hall. And Vera will do no more cooking on this day of days, can’t bear to miss a minute.

  ‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Sadler?’

  ‘Nothing to see yet, Vera.’

  ‘You never know.’

  ‘What about some breakfast?’

  ‘Egg and bacon in the low oven, Mr Sadler.’

  ‘Don’t you want anything?’

  ‘I’ve ’ad mine, duck. ‘Alf past six.’

  ‘You’re daft!’

  Sadler goes to the kitchen. The egg Vera has cooked is pale and solid, the bacon burned to brittleness. Vera never overdoes the egg or frizzles the bacon, but today, well, who can keep their minds on a job of work? Prudent, under the circumstances to have decreed a national holiday.

  Sadler enjoys having the kitchen to himself, enjoys throwing away Vera’s egg and frying himself some bread and tomatoes and making fresh coffee. He lingers over the little meal, and laughs, not so much at Vera, but because of the quiet pleasure he is feeling. When he wanders back into the servants’ hall he is accused with a contemptuous sniff of having ‘missed the guards’.

  ‘What guards?’

  ‘The guards. Look … we’ll see them in a minute … look, there … all round that mound thing and down the Mall, see?’

  ‘Do we have to sit in the dark, Vera?’

  ‘Well, you can’t see if you don’t. It’s like the pictures, that’s what the Colonel said when ’e showed me how to turn it on.’

  ‘It was nice that they got a TV for us.’

  ‘Well, we wouldn’t like you to miss it, Madam said. I just couldn’t bear to think we had the chance to see it and you didn’t, that’s what she said. Look, there’s Mr Churchill arriving at the Abbey.’

  ‘Is it? Now he looks his age, poor old boy, doesn’t he? Looks a hundred.’

  ‘Well, ’e is, isn’t ’e? Not a hundred, mind …’

  There is reverence now in Dimbleby’s voice as the cameras follow the Prime Minister’s shaky steps to the Abbey. In Parliament Square, as the rain keeps falling, people cheer him.

  ‘Have you seen them yet, Vera?’

  ‘Who, duck?’

  ‘Madam and the Colonel.’

  ‘No. Camera moves too fast.’

  ‘Did they take mackintoshes?’

  ‘Dunno. Shouldn’t’ve thought so, not yesterday.’

  ‘I hope they enjoy it.’

  ‘We’ll see more than what they will.’

  ‘But we won’t dance at the Savoy, Vera!’

  ‘No. Never mind, eh.’

  ‘Madam likes the Savoy. She often talks about it.’

  ‘Who’s that man?’

  ‘Don’t know. Never seen him.’

  ’E’s gettin’ a cheer.’

  ‘They cheer everyone, they’ll be hoarse by the time the Princess arrives.’

  ‘The Queen, you mean.’

  ‘She was looking forward to that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mrs Bassett. They got me to book their table at the Savoy months ago.’

  ‘Well, it’s right to make a night of it. Come to think of it, I could do with a beer meself.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Got ter start sometime.’

  Sadler goes out to the pantry to get the beer the Colonel has ordered for them. When he returns, Vera is biting her gnarled fingers with delight and he sees that down the Mall the waving tip of the long ribbon of coaches has swung
.

  ‘Won’t be long now.’

  Sadler pours Vera a glass of beer and sits down. He reflects that the procession has a story-book flavour as it begins to gild the grey London street. A hand, these dancing characters seem to smile, opened the book and let us out and we’ll prance for you, round and round, until the cheering has died and the umbrellas are folded. On and on, round and round, in all our magnificence until you close the book and we cease to exist. But our brightest jewel, the one we’ve saved almost till last, she gives our pageantry its wonder, because she is—

  ‘’Ere she comes!’

  ‘And now …’ Dimbleby is mellow with emotion, ‘the moment these crowds, these thousands of people from all corners of the earth gathered here have waited hours, even days for …’

  ‘God bless ’er!’ says Vera, draining her glass of beer. ‘That’s what Vera says, Ma’am. God bless yer!’

  Vera finishes her beer and then somewhere above Dimbleby’s voice, above the bands and above the cheering, another noise claims attention, spoiling Vera’s moment, pulling Sadler to his feet from the chair he is now comfortable in – the telephone ringing …

  Sadler woke.

  He was hot, his whole body damp with sweat, his mouth gasping for air like a fish, hands fighting their way up, grabbing the covers and throwing them back. But then, cold in seconds, in his own sweat, lying there freezing cold, remembering the dream and marvelling that, as always, the sequence was so exact, so free from the distortion dreams usually gave. And he could always stop it there, just as the Queen’s golden coach began its ride to the Abbey and Vera drank a toast in beer and the telephone rang. He could always manage, at that point, to wake himself up – before he got to the study and lifted the telephone receiver.

  ‘Hentswell Hall?’

  ‘Yes, this is Hentswell Hall. Mr Sadler speaking.’

  ‘Oh. Police here, Sir. Could you tell me please if you would be a relation of Colonel or Mrs Bassett?’

  ‘No. I’m their butler.’

  ‘I see. And there wouldn’t be any relations staying at all in the house?’

  ‘No. The Colonel and Mrs Bassett are … there’s only myself and the cook.’

  ‘I see. Well, I’m very sorry to have to give you bad news on this day above all, but I have to tell you that there was an accident early this morning involving Colonel and Mrs Bassett.’

  ‘Accident?’

  ‘Yes. Motor car crash. Colonel Bassett’s car was in collision with a bus in the Knightsbridge area.’

  Sadler sat down on the Colonel’s leather writing chair.

  ‘And the Colonel and —?’

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid. The hospital informed us that the Colonel died twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘The Colonel’s dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Mad — and Mrs Bassett?’

  ‘She’s in St George’s, in Intensive Care. But they can’t hold out much hope I understand.’

  The image came to Sadler then: the Colonel and Madge, bizarrely coroneted like the peers and peeresses he’d seen going into the Abbey, riding side by side in an open coach, smiling as they waved. But then the coach began to weave and slide on the slippery road and the cheers that had greeted the smiling pair turned to shrieks of terror and people shouted out and began to point as one of the wheels went rolling away from the coach and it spun round and round like a fairground car, out of control, spinning and sliding and still they waved, Madge waved like a queen …

  ‘You still there …?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, I …’

  ‘If you would be kind enough to tell me who should be contacted. Sons or daughters?’

  ‘No one. There’s no one.’

  ‘No children at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nephews or nieces? Someone of the family?’

  ‘No. There’s no family.’

  ‘I see. Well, you will inf —’

  ‘Should I come?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘To the hospital?’

  ‘Entirely up to you. Everything, of course, is being done that can be done.’

  Vera was at the study door.

  ‘Come on, love. You’re missing the best bit.’

  Of course the Colonel never was very good at driving. Too used to Wren, Sadler supposed, learnt to drive too late. And London; he never could get on with traffic lights that looked three different ways. ‘Far better, Geoffrey,’ Madge had cautioned, ‘to take a taxi from Knightsbridge Green. We’ll never be able to park the car.’ But, ‘Nonsense, dear,’ he’d said, ‘just a question of leaving enough time.’

  When the police telephoned again an hour or two later to say that Madge had died, all Sadler was able to recall was Vera’s weeping, a thin, crouching, snivelling Vera, dabbing at her nose with a handkerchiefed paw, like a squirrel feeding itself nuts. Watching her, Sadler knew that she wept not so much out of sorrow, but out of fear. Such a rag of an old woman she was now, and never a very good cook at that. Vera had clung to Madge and her kitchen and her routine and, without her, she knew she was lost.

  Sadler said nothing. An arm, he thought, laid gently round those hunched, heaving shoulders, might reassure, might be misinterpreted as guidance. But who was he to say to what hopelessness Vera had arrived? He just sat and watched her, till, empty of tears, she turned a clown’s face towards him and said: ‘let’s ’ave the TV on again, Mr Sadler.’

  He got up and turned on the switch and he and Vera sat side by side on the old sofa, waiting for the sound and the flickery picture. Then Dimbleby’s voice, fallen unaccountably into what seemed like an imitation of Lawrence Olivier, clipped: ‘The Queen is crowned. The Queen is crowned.’

  BIG NIGHT FUN WENT ON INTO THE SMALL HOURS, so Madge’s Daily Mail informed Sadler the next day. ‘Princes, Ambassadors, statesmen and courtiers toasted the Queen in champagne and then danced until dawn at the Savoy.

  ‘Beneath hundreds of yards of dove-grey material, which transformed the ballroom into a vast tent, set in an Elizabethan Garden laid out with camellias and box hedges, 1,200 of us feasted on foie gras, melon, sole, salmon and lamb.’

  ‘So unfair of me,’ Sadler heard Madge say. ‘I’m always doing it, aren’t I – telling you about things I’ve enjoyed. Very selfish of me, I suppose, but it was so wonderful. All those camelleias and little hedge sort of things and Noël Coward sang, all our favourites, you can’t imagine, such a spirit of Englishness, so right, so moving, and of course that’s what she said, wasn’t it – “Let us cherish our own way of life.”’

  Well, for Madge that life was gone. The garden that had been her solace, that spoke to her, lulled her, would tilt a great green face towards the rain, never aware that she had existed.

  Poor old thing. Yes, Sadler could think of her like that now that he was fully awake and not sweating any more and the dream had gone. And yet minutes ago – that dance of the open carriage on the wet street, wheeling, turning …

  ‘Don’t let her die, Ma,’ he’d once said as Little Dorrit crept chillingly towards tragedy, and she’d only laughed. ‘Nothing I can do, softy! It’s in the book.’

  Sadler closed his eyes. He had no idea if he’d slept for minutes or hours. He felt very tired, so he supposed he couldn’t have been asleep for long, but he thought, time doesn’t have the dimensions it used to, the ones I’d grown accustomed to. Somewhere, I’ve fallen out of step with time. Only lately. Part of madness, no doubt. The beginning of the humiliating end. He’d met old people (quite funny, they were) who never knew what day it was, Christmas or Tuesday, or what time of day, called everybody the wrong names, spat out every minute some morsel of a confused past. Death, their relations murmured, would be a blessed release from such embarrassing, even obscene muddling. Couldn’t wait to bury the old things and put up clean white sensible stones.

  The bed was wet. I’m worse than the dog, Sadler thought. At least he does it on the floor, not on his blanket. And now he had all the foul, tiring busines
s of taking off the sheets, finding clean ones and putting them on. Did all old people piss in their beds? ‘Never mind, Jacky,’ his mother had said when he’d done it as a small child (too cold to get out of bed to use the pot, enjoyed doing it, feeling the heat creeping down his legs), ‘you couldn’t help it, love. And little boys always have more trouble than girls.’

  Well, he certainly had trouble now. But he was too old to feel ashamed, much too used to living inside what he called his ‘old wreck’. If it leaked, his feet got wet; too bad.

  But then he thought, rather than tire myself out taking off the wet sheets, why not go and get that key and use my old room tonight? Up there, high above the orchard, he might sleep in the kind of healing, dreamless way he fancied he’d once slept. And seeing all the old things, the picture, the flowery curtains, the brass bed, might raise his spirits, help him to sort himself out. For of what importance to anyone or anything had been his last twenty years? Old already at fifty-three, tired already, so he’d believed, he’d been glad to shut himself away and let the world pass him by.

  There had been Vera, of course, at first. Lonely, unlovable Vera, whom he’d told to stay on if she wanted to, live like a queen in one of the best rooms if she wanted to.

  ‘Lor! Don’t seem right.’

  ‘Why not, Vera? Everyone deserves a little rest, and now your turn’s come along. It’s a question of getting used to the idea, that’s all.’

  But she couldn’t, she said, not live like that. So she’d gone on much as usual, living in her old room, getting up early to cook breakfast for herself and Sadler, until one morning she didn’t get up at all, just couldn’t move, she said, only her arms and her top half, the rest of her stiff as a ramrod and inert.

  ‘Bleedin’ ’eck, Mr Sadler, what’s ’appened?’