Sadler's Birthday

by Rose Tremain

  Miss Reader assumed her professional voice.

  ‘What does he talk about?’

  ‘The things he reads. And his Ma.’

  Sadler was disappointed. He’d told Tom that he’d spend this, his day off, with him. He’d even suggested he pack them up some sandwiches, go for a long walk, watch them burning off stubble, maybe even go as far as the river and have a picnic there. He’d been looking forward to it. Now he turned his back on the stream and started to walk towards the house.

  Miss Reader followed.

  ‘I was just thinking, Mr Sadler, if you do find the days a bit long … thinking up things for him to do, you know … I live in the village and you could bring him down one afternoon, perhaps on your day off, for a cup of tea?’

  ‘Thank you, Miss,’ Sadler said, ‘but I wouldn’t like to put you to the trouble.’

  ‘Oh, it wouldn’t be any trouble.’

  ‘And as I said, he’s best left alone …’

  ‘Oh, of course, just at the moment. Period of adjustment – that’s what they call it, don’t they? But in a week or two.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss,’ said Sadler. Then he nodded goodbye and walked quickly away from her towards the back door.

  IV

  Sadler was aware of the spring. When you got old, or so he found, all that spring did to you was remind you of other springs, springs that had bloomed into summers and burned out long ago, springs when the sight of straight, bright grass coming up in last winter’s pale hay had been enough to set your mind muddling forward to some new endeavour, springs when you weren’t old.

  He couldn’t remember when spring had started to hurt him. Ages ago, probably. He’d been old it seemed for so long. Old at fifty, and since then a shameful decline. Looking at the buds, the contained, strong growth everywhere creeping out, he tried to imagine his body crushed and crammed into one of those tiny sheaths, reduced to something no bigger than a bean, but with the whole of its existence in front, not behind, the whole of his being curled there, growing, the flower and the leaf yet to come. He spat. Silly old fool, what thoughts!

  But this happened quite a lot now, particularly on days when he was tired. He’d have these odd notions about himself, shunting his mind backwards in time, dwelling on things that once seemed important and on things that had never happened. A muddle, he decided. That’s all I’ve become. Not coherent any more, even. Typical case of senile decay. Decay of body into lumbering old wreck, decay of mental faculties.

  He leant on his stick looking at his orchard. So foolish to drag what little power of thinking left to me backwards. Why not think forward into the tiny bit – moments even? – left to come? And try to understand. Understand yourself at least. Because what’s there in the past to give you any clue? What’s to show for all that time? An awareness of your mediocrity, a growing despondency. That was all. Nothing else of any note, was there? After seventy-six years – from soft-skinned child grubbing on a green square to a blotchy old man who limped, and whose mouth, for some humiliating reason, made too much saliva – was that all he could think of to say? He searched, of course. The search had become frenzied. Now hardly an hour went by without him finding some buried splinter of his existence and picking at it. But, probe as he did, he could find nothing much of any significance: just the odd day – odd hour, really, because that was the burning time of the fuses occasionally lit with happiness – yes, the odd hour of wonder. There were, he decided, about seven or eight of these in all that time. A long time, though, or just a few minutes? Impossible to tell how long, like the dreams he’d had, or like the film, one of the few he’d ever seen, where they’d gone through three generations in as many hours and Elizabeth Taylor had grown old and died as he sat there going through a bag of popcorn.

  And now the spring had turned up again. Still half immersed, but there. There. Even in the sounds he could hear. There. To taunt him, he supposed. And why not? A foolish spectacle, he was, leaning on his stick – like the beggar in fairy tales who pops out of a wood and alters the whole story. No story left for him to alter. The ending was already set down.

  When? He often thought there must be a point when there was still a choice to be made, or was it made before he was born? By the mother he’d loved or the father he’d never seen? Or was Greg Sadler to blame, for dying?

  Greg Sadler’s death made Annie a prisoner. Her future, from that point, was determined not by her own wishes but by her need for money. She found no alternative but to gather up her child and move reluctantly forwards to the only thing that offered – a position as chamber-maid at Milord’s house.

  They gave her a narrow room, furnished with a brass bed, a chair, a chest of drawers and a child’s picture. They gave her food and a uniform and a few shillings a week. They gave her milk for Jack. On her days off, she’d go to see Betsy who’d given up her job at Mrs Collard’s and was getting married that Easter to one John Thomas, assistant manager of the pork pie factory.

  Betsy was too delighted with herself to want to muddy her hands in Annie’s sorrows. She told herself that by communicating to Annie all her joy (‘just think, Annie, go to Mrs Collard’s, he said, and choose whatever you like, whatever material you like for your dress’) she’d brighten her drab day. ‘And in a few years, or so he says, he’s certain to be manager – imagine, manager at thirty-two – and then we’ll be really set up, won’t we?’ Because Annie had always been able to be happy about other people’s good fortune, hadn’t she? And what was there to say about Annie’s life now?

  The work wasn’t so hard that it calloused her hands or rubbed the skin off her knees. Miss Rhodes, the housekeeper, took a fancy to her and gave her sweets for little Jack. And Milady, when she saw her, usually smiled. Merely, she had lost her freedom. ‘But there’s no sense in moaning, Annie, is there?’ said Betsy, giving her friend’s bondage her reluctant attention. ‘I mean, if you think about it another way, you were lucky to be taken on at all with the baby and that and it was really only because of my Dad knowing that Mr Knightley …’

  Her day began at five. So comfortable, so far off, they seemed, those mornings when she’d tiptoed down at seven to light the fire and make breakfast for her father. Now she fumbled in the near darkness, waking Jack who slept at her side, dressing him, telling him each morning not to make a sound till they were downstairs. Then making a porridge for them both, something warm before she began work laying fires, with Jack traipsing round after her. The ‘stick man’ she called him, because she knew she had to make fun of the work, giving him the basket of kindling to carry. That early, it was very cold in the enormous house. It would have been wonderful, Annie often thought, to put a match to the fires she laid. Then, cleaning the brass stair rods, Jack with a soft rag following – the ‘shiny man’ now. But they had to hurry, be out of the way before Milord came down for his breakfast on the dot of seven. And then came the best moment of the day: they’d go back to the kitchen, warm now with all the stoves burning, and have a mug of tea, and Cook, if she had time, would fry up the bacon rind for Jack and he’d eat it with his fingers.

  They let him play in the garden. Not in front of the house where he could be seen by anyone coming up the drive, but out at the back, safely out of sight beyond a little pine wood. Annie would lose sight of him for hours on end, crane out of top windows, trying to catch a glimpse of him now and then as she went about her morning tasks, fearful if she couldn’t see him, but ‘don’t you go chasing after him,’ Miss Rhodes had warned, ‘you’ve got a job to do.’

  ‘Well, be thankful they let him play,’ Betsy remarked.

  Annie grew silent. She talked to Jack when they were on their own, but avoided the servants’ hall and angered Miss Rhodes by being ‘cold’. She missed the familiar, self-important little town and gradually the great expanses of field and wood that surrounded her became as unfriendly as a high wall. She drifted. Days, cold, quiet, became years.

  Jack grew up. He was bought a satchel and sent off to the vill
age school, walking there each day, a mile there and a mile back. It was at this time that Annie began stealing books from the library to read to him. Ivanhoe took her a year to get through. There was something about the print and the heaviness of the book, she said, that seemed to make her sleepy. But Jack always looked forward to those reads. Coming home from school, he’d think firstly about his tea – bread and jam and sometimes muffins, if Cook had made any – and then about the next bit of the story, told in that gentle, whispering voice and the nightly ritual of the book being hidden away like some priceless treasure under the mattress. Part of the magic of these stories lay in his own role as conspirator with Annie. ‘You must never say a word about it, Jackie. Not to Cook or Miss Rhodes or Mr Knightley or anyone at all. They’d send us away if they found out, and then what would happen?’

  But he was old enough, aware enough by that time to have made plans to save them, if that day ever came. The plans changed with the stories, and sometimes, when he’d made a particularly exciting one, he secretly hoped they would be discovered and sent away. Then his hour would come and off they’d set, he buoyant, strong, full of reassurance and his mother mysteriously and suddenly infirm, leaning on his shoulder. ‘Oh don’t worry,’ he said, when she began the thing about not telling, ‘I’ll look after you.’

  Then came a morning when, dressed for school, sitting on the hearthrug with his bag of kindling, watching Annie shovel out the ashes under the drawing room grate, his eyes lighted on the grand piano. Its sides and lid were inlaid with a marvellous pattern of flowers and leaves and it shone. Tired in the early mornings now that he spent his days at school and bored by the ritual of the fire, he left his kindling bag, went over to the piano and opened the lid.

  ‘Jack, don’t!’

  ‘Why can’t I?’

  ‘Come away, Jackie.’

  ‘Just one note. Let me.’

  ‘No. You’ll wake the whole house.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Leave it, Jack.’

  ‘You play, then.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Please, Ma.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just one thing.’

  ‘I can’t remember anything.’

  ‘Oh go on.’

  Annie was standing by him now, her hand ready to snatch his away.

  ‘Just something. Please, Ma.’

  It was so long since she’d sat down at a piano. Her own had been sold after Greg died. Her fingers had stiffened since then, but she believed she still knew one or two pieces in her head and, standing looking at the keyboard, she was suddenly curious, suddenly longed to find out if the process would begin and her hands would remember where to go. She hesitated. To know that she could still play would have been so nice. She thought, if she could remember even one piece, she might take out some of the old sheets of music and go through them humming the notes, knowing that if ever she got the chance …

  ‘No one’ll hear, Ma. They’re asleep.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Something quiet. Couldn’t you?’

  ‘We shouldn’t.’

  ‘But you always told me you could play.’

  Jack got up and she sat down on the stool, automatically adjusting it to the right height and feeling the pedals with her feet. In front of her the notes were surprisingly familiar. She recognized patterns. Jack stood behind her, like someone waiting to turn her music.

  Then she started to play. A piece out of her girlhood past, nameless, Chopin she thought, but what key, what number? She couldn’t remember. She had the music somewhere. She could look it up and then one day play it again properly with the notes in front of her, all the right notes. But she couldn’t get to the end. Somewhere, after a perfectly remembered beginning, the process stopped and her hands were lost.

  ‘Go on,’ Jack said.

  She was dejected now.

  ‘Can’t remember any more, love.’

  ‘Bet you can.’

  ‘No, honest. Anyway, we’ve got work to do, haven’t we?’

  Jack walked to school thinking about that scrap of music. At break-time, when they went out into the playground, he told his friend, Eric Lufty, that his mother could play better than Mrs Dean, the music teacher, but Eric Lufty said he didn’t think Mrs Dean played very well anyhow. So Jack supposed it must have been what she played. It wasn’t a march or a hymn or Activity Music like they had at school, it was something else. ‘It’s better, anyway,’ he said.

  Then when he got back in the afternoon, going into the kitchen as he always did for his tea, he found no one there. Usually Cook had laid a plate for him and put a loaf out, and his mother, if she wasn’t busy, would be making tea. But the kitchen was deserted, its scrubbed floor damp as it always was in the afternoons, but not a soul there.

  ‘Ma!’

  But Mr Knightley came out of the servants’ hall, his face very straight and hard like it was when he served in the dining room.

  ‘Sit down, Jack.’

  Jack took off his satchel and sat at the table.

  ‘Now listen to me.’

  There was an ominous whispering quality to Mr Knightley’s voice as he began.

  ‘I want you to realize, Jack, that it is only through my intervention that your mother wasn’t dismissed at once. There’ll be no second chance, Jack, and you know quite well what I’m talking about. Servants in this house go into his Lordship’s rooms to do their work and once that work is done, they go back to where they belong. They touch nothing. They take nothing.’

  Jack’s heart began to race as he thought of Tom Sawyer under the mattress.

  ‘Do you understand, Jack?’

  He was on the point of saying: ‘We don’t steal them, Mr Knightley. We only borrow them.’ And then, just in time, he remembered the endlessly repeated swearing to secrecy and said nothing.

  ‘Do you?’

  Dumb, Jack nodded.

  ‘That piano is priceless – a priceless object. I told His Lordship that I was sure your mother never would have dreamed of touching it if you hadn’t asked her and all I can tell you, Jack, is that you’re very lucky, very lucky indeed to find yourself in the care of such understanding people …’

  So Tom Sawyer was safe after all. It was that little bit of music that worried them.

  ‘Where’s my tea, Mr Knightley?’

  ‘I want this lesson learnt, Jack Sadler, so I instructed Cook …’

  ‘Aren’t I getting any tea?’

  ‘I instructed Cook not to prepare any meal for you this evening. Now go to your room.’

  He climbed the stairs, dragging his satchel. In the room, he found his mother sitting by their high window, looking out, down on to the summer garden. She was sitting very, very still. So still that Jack was frightened. He went up to her and clambered on to her knee and put his face down into her shoulder.

  She held him for a while, saying nothing, then she said: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice, Jackie, if we had a rocking chair? Don’t you think it would?’

  And after that day, she tried not to speak to anyone at all, only to him. He noticed that if they were in the kitchen having breakfast and Mr Knightley came in, she started telling him to hurry up and get off to school, and if Mr Knightley spoke to her, even kindly, she’d answer him with a mumbled word and never look at him.

  ‘I don’t like Mr Knightley,’ he told her loyally.

  ‘Oh he’s all right in his way,’ she answered.

  But after a while, it seemed to Jack that she hardly noticed other people. She worked with them, ate her meals with them, thanked them if they gave her things for him (sweets usually, but once a book on British Dogs from Miss Rhodes) but seemed to pretend all the time that they weren’t there. And, one weekend, Jack was invited to Eric Lufty’s house. It was tiny. It was the smallest house Jack had ever been in, but it was all theirs, every room. And Mrs Lufty was a mountain of a mother who talked loudly and cheerfully about anything that came into her head and to anyone who happened to be there.
Jack came back feeling small and sorrowful.

  ‘Why don’t you talk to people more, Ma?’ he asked Annie that night. But all she did was pretend to be asleep. Left him lying there with his eyes wide open, worrying about her, wondering if, in the end, her silences would engulf him too. Because the future seemed to lie shrouded in these great folds of silence. Pointless to invent his dramatic plans for their salvation if this was all there was, this quietness.

  Without the familiar pattern of work and sleep through which her body moved, Jack feared that Annie would cease to exist. In his worst imaginings, there was nothing as terrible as that, so he must watch over her constantly and each hour he spent away, wasn’t it possible that he deprived her of an hour of life?

  Then, without any warning, they sent him away. They were sorry, they told Annie, but they couldn’t go on paying out for him past his fourteenth birthday. She must understand. So a position had been found for him. A friend of Milady’s wanted an under footman and was quite happy to take him on at once and train him. He’d start on a very small wage, of course, but he was a bright boy and already knew a lot about the way a big house was managed. He’d do well. Milady wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up as butler one of these days.

  Annie wept. Was it really all those years ago that she’d held him, tiny little thing, in her arms? With Greg standing over and saying: ‘You never believe it till it happens, do you? You never believe it till it happens!’ Fourteen years, gone in one yesterday.

  And Jack? He spent his last days in Milord’s house chattering excitedly, telling everyone that next term he’d be in the one from top form at school. But the adult faces looked at him strangely. Pity made them feel uncomfortable and the servants’ hall was out of joint until he’d gone.

  Summer. High summer, but a rainy one, if Jack remembered rightly. And with the rain must have settled a kind of despair. Thank Christ that particular time was past, then. At least nothing much else in his life had been as bad as that. He’d made strides after that. Got on. Because it occurred to him at that time that it was lack of control over his own life that had brought him to this loneliness. And he decided, shining the buttons on his new uniform, to gain that control.