Sadler's Birthday Read online

  Anyway, there was no one. No good wishing you’d taken out a kind of insurance policy against loneliness when you hadn’t. Best thing to do was give someone else the chance to be wise – for what difference could it make when the day came? And when you thought about it, there was no need to tie material possessions to love, though in her experience they always had been. Why not tie them to need? It made more sense. She wasn’t so blind and old-fashioned that she couldn’t see that, even if she couldn’t help disagreeing with a lot of the things Mr Attlee said. But of course she knew the Colonel wouldn’t understand; it wasn’t really fair to expect him to. He’d always been so keen on everything staying in the family, even when she’d reminded him that they had none. No, it would have disturbed the Colonel if she’d told him her plan. To her, it was the most rational thing she’d ever done in her life and she was rather proud of it. She thought it was sad in a way that she had to keep it to herself, but there it was.

  Sadler was oddly moved by the extraordinary stroke of fortune that one June morning in 1953 made him master where for years he had been servant. Sad for her, was his first thought, that she had no one else to leave it to. He’d seen enough of Mr Knightley’s Privileged Classes to know that they could be deeply hurt by the glimpse of a single possession slipping through the family net and he fancied that Madge had needed some courage to put her hand to her extraordinary testament. Had she died seven hours earlier, he would have got nothing, only the thousand pounds left to him by the Colonel. For they raced for death, the Colonel and his Madge. As vast crowds began gathering in London, sleeping out, camping on little stools near the very place where Madge had married, making flags to wave, telling their children that never, never would there be such a sight again, as they massed, expectant, long-suffering, patient, determined for that flying glimpse of the new Queen riding to her Coronation in her golden coach, Madge and the Colonel waited to die.

  ‘Poor old things …’ Sadler mumbled.

  He didn’t want to think about it, though. Not now. He often did remember it, but this morning for some reason it made him feel terribly sad. He glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. Eight o’clock. Time moved so slowly these days. Too fast when you wanted it to stop of course, like when someone you cared to see called and then kept saying they’d have to hurry or they’d be late for something or other, but so painfully slowly when you were on your own. He sipped his tea, expecting it to be cold by now, but it wasn’t, it was still almost too hot to drink.

  Then he remembered Mrs Moore. She’d be coming at half past eight. Only another half hour and she’d be there. Unless it was Sunday. He couldn’t bear it to be Sunday and her not to come. He wasn’t hungry at all, but he knew he’d ask her to make him breakfast if she came because she’d have to stay longer if she made breakfast, and there’d be time for a chat.

  But Mrs Moore had said she’d have to stop coming soon. It was her legs. She couldn’t get about like she used to. And the stairs – they could do dreadful things to your knees, stairs could.

  ‘You’ll have to find someone else, Mr Sadler,’ she said one morning, ‘it’s getting too much for me.’

  ‘Too untidy, am I? Never used to be, of course.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not that, Mr Sadler. I just can’t manage this type of work any more. I’m too old, I daresay.’

  ‘We’re all getting on. But you oughtn’t to think about it. Look at the dog. You’d never say he was a hundred and five, would you! Still wags his tail.’

  Sadler chuckled, but Mrs Moore only shook her head. ‘Poor little old fellow.’

  ‘Happier than I am, Mrs Moore, you mark my words. He’s got me and that’s all a dog needs, a good master. They don’t miss the company of their own kind, do they?’

  ‘Friends are of our making, Mr Sadler. If you …’

  ‘All dead, mine.’

  ‘Well, there’s Reverend Chapman at least. He’s a regular caller.’

  ‘I never gave Jesus the time of day, Mrs Moore. Not since I was a lad and said my prayers in my mother’s lap.’

  ‘Well, I’ve always said, Mr Sadler, God helps those that help themselves.’

  And Sadler was left on his own, pricked with the little needle of her spurious wisdom, sunk in gloom.

  She won’t leave, though, he told himself now. She knows I like the companionship. Don’t mind about the sweeping and polishing any more, it’s the company. He thought of the house now in the same way that he thought of himself. There was so little of it left alive – most of it had been closed and shuttered long ago. What mattered was to keep going the bit of it in which he still lived – a couple of rooms, that was all. You had to keep them clean and aired, even if they were cold and draughty in winter. You had to let them hear the sound of voices once in a while, too. Silence accumulated otherwise, like dust.

  He wondered suddenly how thick the dust was lying in his old room, the room with the child’s picture. I might go and see, he thought, must’ve been two years since anyone went in there. And he finished his tea, glad now that he had thought of something to do. If it’s not too bad, he decided, I’ll sleep up there tonight. It’d make a change and it might be warmer than the Colonel’s room. He got up and, trying not to wake the dog, tiptoed out into the cold passageway.

  He shuffled into the hall, up the wide stairs with their loose stair-rods and their worn grey carpeting and on to the first floor landing. Then into his bedroom to find his slippers, out and up a narrower flight of stairs to where the coconut matting began. ‘It’s hard wearing,’ Vera had said, ‘but you couldn’t call it smart.’ Even less now. Its edges were frayed and its colours were faded and spoiled.

  Sadler walked to the door of his old room, waited a moment outside it and then turned the door handle. It turned but the door didn’t move. Another of those wrong decisions, Sadler thought with dismay, made a year or more ago – never thought I’d need to go in there again, no doubt, shut the door and locked it and lost the key. He cursed. Time was when all the keys of the house were kept in a tin box in the Colonel’s room and carefully labelled. But that was long ago. He hadn’t seen that box for years.

  He turned tail and limped down the stairs. I can remember every inch of that room, he thought, no need really to see a thing when you can remember it so well. All the same, it would have been nice to touch all the old things.

  ‘That you, Mr Sadler?’

  Oh she was there then. Couldn’t be Sunday, thank Jesus.

  ‘Mrs Moore?’

  She was standing in the hall.

  ‘I’m a bit early, Sir. Hope you don’t mind.’

  There was something he wanted to ask her, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what.

  ‘I’ll get on, then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve not a lot of time this morning. I’ve got my sister staying and I promised I’d take her into town.’

  ‘That’d be nice.’

  ‘I like to get in before the crowds.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘That seems to get worse ’n worse, Saturday.’

  ‘I suppose it would.’

  And then she was gone, tying her apron round her as she bustled off, leaving Sadler standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  II

  Annie Sadler, sitting at her father’s upright piano, liked to dream. She played with a lot of feeling, so her teacher said; a little more practice and she’d be very good. So sometimes Annie dreamed of fame and sometimes of love.

  Greg Sadler, her father, was a piano tuner. He made a fair living in those distant days, when all respectable homes had a piano. December, of course, was the busiest time of year for him, when Christmas crept into sight and families began to think of the sing-song they’d have – Good King Wenceslas and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Uncle George or Aunt Beatrice playing, wrong notes and all but so good for the spirit. He’d be working twelve hours a day sometimes in the weeks before Christmas, come home sick and tired of the sound of the darned instrumen
t, to find his daughter playing away in the front room in the dark, always Chopin and with a wrapt expression on her face. ‘Lord,’ he’d say crossly, ‘what’s wrong with supper then, Annie?’

  But he spared her no love. He’d brought her up on his own and in her he had vested a formless kind of hope. She wasn’t pretty of course. Never had been, even as a little girl. Her face was much too long and her hair so fine and wispy you’d fancy the wind could blow it away. But she had a stillness about her that folk found appealing. And she was all he had.

  They lived in a small house in a clean little town in Suffolk that went about its business with a ponderous slowness, found a respectable response to the ringing of its Sunday bell and prospered a little from its recently built pork pie factory. Annie liked it. By the time she was sixteen, in 1898, she recognized that to walk down its short main street was to her like being held between two familiar, comforting arms and she vowed she would never leave it. Oh she was timid all right, far too timid and shy for a girl of her age, Greg Sadler was aware of that. But to snatch her up and drop her somewhere else would have caused her such pain that he never would have suggested it, although, as her aunt declared on a visit from London, it might have done her the world of good.

  She wasn’t particularly clever. At school she’d done her best with the books she’d had to read, but the music lessons were all she cared about. In the summer, on hot days when all the windows were open, the whole street could hear her playing. ‘I don’t know,’ Greg used to mutter to her as she sat there, ‘what are we going to do with you, Annie girl?’

  Do? In Annie’s mind doing was never in question. She’d kept house for her father from the age of eleven when her mother had died and she could imagine no other life. One day, perhaps, the notions she had about love would crystallize and she’d choose a man to bear the burden of them. But until that day came – and somehow it seemed a long way off – she’d pray to God every Sunday to let her stay put.

  Annie had loved her mother. When she died, she wanted everyone to be silent and let her just think, not weep or say she was sorry, but just sit quietly and think about it until she had thought it out. Silence, occasionally, was like darkness: it erased things. And once the funeral was over, the relations come and gone and the cakes eaten, Annie and Greg never spoke about it again. By doing this, they believed they would forget. The less they talked, the less they remembered; the more the silences accumulated, the more the image they wanted to rub out grew invisible.

  When Annie was sixteen and a half, her music teacher got married. Woman of fifty, single all her life, what business had she going off and doing a thing like that? But there she was one fine morning at St Teresa’s Church in her best blue silk, all the neighbours agog, hanging out of windows, and the groom, they all said, very neatly dressed and handsome for a man of his age. The town wished her well, but not without raising an eyebrow or two and everyone declared it impossible to think of a wedding gift, for what could she need at her time of life? Annie gave her a cushion cover she’d worked herself during the evenings when Greg had been too tired to let her play the piano. Then with dismay she watched her leave the town a few weeks later, bound for London.

  For day after day the piano stayed closed. Greg Sadler breathed a sigh of relief, and as if to compensate for what he knew was a selfish feeling, started to tell his daughter what a sweet sight she was these days, looking so grown up now, dressing so nicely on the little money she had, and wouldn’t he just know it if some young lad mightn’t come along who’d take a fancy to her. But with the departure of the one person who had encouraged her, Annie’s favourite dream had fled. She couldn’t play any more and, though she tried, she couldn’t talk to her father as they sat face to face in the evenings. She knew he was trying to cheer her up with all his compliments and she loved him for it, but it did no good. She felt her little girl’s soul going brown.

  Then Greg Sadler met Betsy Elkins, Annie’s friend, in the main street one morning, and Betsy, all gay ribbons and pink smiles, said: ‘Tell you what’s happened, Mr Sadler …’ Greg, late for a client, harassed and hot on this sunny day, stood prisoner for a full ten minutes while Betsy told him that her favourite uncle and aunt, not to mention her handsome cousin Joe, had been left a house no more than three minutes walk from her own, the little one with the yellow windows opposite the church, and wasn’t it exciting they’d be moving in any day.

  Escaping from her with the merest: ‘That’s fine, Betsy’, Greg pondered this information on his hurried way to work. He would, he decided, take the opportunity of a glance at young cousin Joe, and if he liked the look of him, make sure that Annie was dressed up and looking her best the first time she met him. Not a word to Annie, of course. Let her brood over the ugly piano. For wasn’t the first day of spring, arriving undreamed of in winter’s cold lap, the more welcome because unannounced? Greg Sadler loved metaphors and was very proud of this one. So proud, in fact, that he wished he could have said it aloud to someone listening.

  But then on the first of June, before Greg had gone to work, Betsy Elkins came tapping at the Sadlers’ front door. Today was the day of the great arrival, she said, and she was so excited at the thought of their coming that she’d love her friend Annie to share it all with her, especially as couldn’t she see it was a fine morning and it’d be so much fun helping them unpack their things and get everything straight and what’s more she was sure they could do with another pair of hands.

  When Betsy stopped for breath Annie began ‘Well, Bets …’

  ‘Course Annie must go.’ Greg said firmly.

  ‘Monday’s usually——’

  ‘Washing’ll keep, won’t it love?’

  ‘You’ll be needing a clean shirt tomorrow.’

  ‘And a thousand pounds and a lot of other things!’

  Betsy laughed.

  ‘Go on,’ Greg said, ‘go and have some fun, girlie.’

  No sooner said than Betsy had caught Annie’s hand and was dragging her out into the sunshine. ‘We’ve got to go and pick some flowers,’ she was saying, ‘I promised my Mum that we’d be welcoming when they come …’

  After they’d gone, Greg cursed. For what was his Annie wearing that morning if not her old green smock she put on for housework? Why in the world hadn’t he noticed and told her to go and change, to put on something that set off her nice little figure. Angry with himself, he cleared away the breakfast crocks and, unconcerned whether he’d be late for his job, set about washing them up.

  Annie and Betsy filled an old basket with wild blue cornflowers and mauve scabious growing by the hedgerows where the narrow road led eastwards out of town. ‘They never last,’ said Annie, ‘if you pick them.’ But Betsy insisted, for what was more welcoming than a vase of flowers?

  Then they walked back to the house with the yellow windows and Betsy, dismayed by finding the door locked, climbed in, petticoat and little brown boots in the air, through one of the windows. Then as she turned to give a hand to Annie, she remembered she’d forgotten the vase her Mum had said she could borrow. So out she climbed again, her cheeks red and shiny now because of the heat and her breath fast running out.

  ‘You wait here,’ she panted, ‘in case they come. I’ll go and bring the vase.’

  ‘But Betsy …’

  She was off down the street, flying along like a little white butterfly, almost out of sight before Annie could finish her sentence.

  Annie was hot, too. She noticed that the entrance porch to the house had two little stone seats, one on either side of it, so she sat down there, grateful for the shade. What a burning summer’s day it was, the kind of day you remembered when you were old. She sniffed the flowers. All their freshness would be gone in a few hours of this heat. So silly of Betsy to want to pick them. Annie put them down, to spare them the heat of her hand. Then she took off her heavy green smock, folded it up and put it under the seat. Sitting there, in her clean white blouse and her favourite blue skirt, she felt quietly happy.
In the shadow of the porch her wide grey eyes looked very black.

  It was like this, half hidden by the brick pillars of the porch, that Joe Elkins first saw her. His head was damp with sweat from driving the horse and heavy old cart over bumpy roads and the sweat had begun to run down into his eyes, that and the strong sunlight doing their best to blind him. So, as he clambered down from the cart and caught sight of Annie sitting in the shadow, he wondered if she was really there. He rubbed his eyes and he saw her get up and come towards him, holding out some flowers.

  ‘Good morning,’ Joe said.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ Annie began, ‘Betsy just went up to her Mum’s for a vase – for these.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She won’t be more than a minute or two.’

  Joe smiled. ‘Left you on guard, did she?’

  ‘In a way.’ Annie felt herself blushing. ‘I’m Annie Sadler.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Annie Sadler. I’m Joe Elkins, cousin Betsy’s cousin.’

  He’d come on ahead on his own. ‘Family porter, that’s me,’ he said nodding at the loaded cart.

  ‘But they’ll be coming on, your Mum and Dad?’

  ‘Tomorrow afternoon. Mother can’t be doing with any kind of muddle, has to have everything in its place before she’ll sit down.’

  He laughed. Annie looked away, knew otherwise she’d stare at him. He found the key to the front door and opened it. It led into a tiny hallway with rooms branching off and a staircase going straight up. Joe looked back at Annie who hesitated at the door.