Sadler's Birthday

by Rose Tremain

  Tom woke up to see Sadler standing by his bed, looking at his comic.

  ‘That’s mine,’ he said.

  Sadler smiled.

  It was some weeks before the catapult Sadler had ordered arrived, and it was during this time that Tom discovered the ballroom.

  The ballroom was a huge, rectangular room, originally painted light green, but with brownish patches now, where the damp had seeped into the walls.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Madge, ‘how long it is since anyone gave a ball in there. The Colonel and I gave one in about about 1930, but it was perfectly ghastly! Muriel Portsmouth drank too much and vomited on the bandstand and someone started a conga round the garden – a conga! – the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen, and all my roses were ruined. I think I must have put my foot down after that.’

  It had become a place to put things in. Things you didn’t want any more. It was chilly and dark because all the windows were shuttered.

  Tom had managed to open the shutters on four of the windows and there, with an old sofa, broken lamps, a picnic hamper, photo albums, a garden bed on wheels, empty picture frames and piles of magazines and newspapers he decided to pitch his camp. The room became his den. He wanted to have his meals in there, but Vera said: ‘Good ’eavens, duck, you don’t imagine me an’ Betty’s going ter traipse up there with your dinner, do you?’

  He would have slept in there, only Sadler said it was too cold. But it was his place, and he shared it with five ‘others’.

  He discovered the ‘others’ the day he discovered the ballroom. Five flat men, made of thin wood, painted but faded now with age and sunshine, their eyes pale as mothballs and their bodies shot through with tiny holes.

  The Colonel had set up a rifle range years ago in the field above the orchard. There had been one or two of his army cronies who’d been keen and he’d had the figures built so that they could hold competitions. They only held one competition and the Colonel won, so he thought he’d stop it at that, quit while he was ahead. But the flat men had stood out in the range for years, growing paler and paler as seasons passed and no one shot at them, until one summer Madge had hit upon the idea of lending them to the local fête. They were loaded on to a lorry and driven off to the football ground where the Hentswell fête was held. They were shot at for a whole afternoon, a hot Sunday in August, and then that same lorry brought them back, and Sadler and the lorry driver carried them one by one into the ballroom. Here Tom found them and stood them up round the room and gave them names – Ginger, Soapy, Norman (his favourite), Hans (a German) and Roger. They all looked exactly the same. The only way to tell them apart was by the different patterning of little holes in them. But Tom told Sadler countless things about them as individuals, a layer of complex detail covering their sameness, obliterating it.

  ‘Roger’s an orphan,’ he said, ‘that’s why he had spots.’

  Roger’s face, it was true, was horribly pitted with holes.

  ‘Norman’s my best one.’

  ‘Why, Tom?’

  ‘Well, he listens to me.’

  ‘What about Hans?’

  ‘He’s a German.’

  ‘What’s he doing in England?’

  ‘He’s a prisoner.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And the others don’t like him because ’e’s a German and that.’

  ‘And Ginger?’

  ‘He’s called after Ma’s cat. Cats are his favourite animal. He has cat exhibitions, see?’

  Tom had picked some of the largest leaves he could find off the virginia creeper that grew outside the ballroom, and laid them out, evenly spaced, on the long table. They were different shades of red and orange.

  ‘That’s Ginger’s cat exhibition. You can judge it if you like.’

  So Sadler judged it, selecting three leaves and designating them first, second and third.

  ‘What can we give as prizes?’

  ‘Pick something out of Soapy’s shop.’

  Soapy had been stood in a corner and at his feet had been laid all the smaller items Tom had found – broken crockery, dusty old decanters, an alarm clock, a cutlery tray, two piles of the Illustrated London News, an empty jewel case, an assortment of lamps.

  ‘He sells those things.’

  Sadler fumbled in his pocket for money.

  ‘You don’t have to buy them, Jack.’

  Sadler caught his breath. It was years now since anyone had called him by his name. He wanted to thank Tom. He wanted to hold the boy to him and tell him that although he wouldn’t understand, it meant a lot to him. He found sixpence and held it out.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ said Tom, ‘it’s only a game.’

  It wasn’t that Ginger and company were substitutes for real friends Tom had known and was missing. He hadn’t made any real friends. He’d played with the other boys in his street and in the playground at school, but the boundaries of their friendship were drawn by the lines of chalk which mapped out their games. When the game ended, when the whistle blew or someone’s Ma called out, they shrugged him off. There never seemed to be any use for him outside the game.

  He had gone with a crowd of boys from school one Saturday to a fair. But instead of riding on the roundabouts, all the others had wanted to do was to watch the girls’ skirts blowing up as they went round. Tom had got bored with staring at girls’ thighs, wandered off and found a stall where you could win a goldfish by bouncing a ping-pong ball into a glass jar. He had thirteen goes, spent all the money his Ma had given him, and still the ping-pong ball wouldn’t stay in the jar. With his money gone, he could only stare miserably at the amazing fish. He could just imagine how it would feel to carry one home.

  ‘Go on then, mate,’ the stall owner said.

  Tom looked up, unbelieving. Then he saw the man pick up one of the bowls with a goldfish in it and hand it to him.

  ‘Cor!’ said Tom. ‘Thanks, mister.’

  He carried it home, the other boys forgotten. He carried it so carefully that not a drop of water was spilt. He waited up, staring at it for hours until his Ma got in and he could show it to her.

  ‘Go on!’ she said, ‘you must’ve got one in. You never get something for nothing.’

  It wasn’t nothing, he explained, it was all the money he had. He probably could have bought a goldfish three times over with that money. But she still didn’t believe him, until the following morning when they woke to find the goldfish floating, belly up, dead as you like.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘that explains it, don’t it? ’E must have know the poor little sod was on its last legs.’

  No. Friends had been no good to Tom. Ginger and Soapy and Norman and Hans and the orphaned Roger were better than friends. They were better than animals or fish. They could be soldiers if you chose, they could be kings. And more than anything, you were indispensable to them. You held their existence in your head.

  The days weren’t long any more. The days flew.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Vera one morning to Sadler, ‘he’s made strides, that boy.’

  He didn’t hang around the kitchen any more, asking questions and getting in her way.

  ‘He’s happy now,’ Sadler told her.

  The weather was getting very cold. It rained a lot in November, and Madge and the Colonel spent more and more of each day together, because, they seemed to be saying, what with the confusing news from France and the rain falling, they needed to comfort each other. They’d sit and talk or do crosswords or play Gin Rummy. And when the news came on the wireless, Madge would sometimes reach out and hold the Colonel’s hand. She was waiting, she said, for something to happen. She’d begun to feel uneasy, as if they were falling silently, those German bombs, from an unimaginable height, taking days and days to come whispering down.

  ‘Come on, old thing,’ the Colonel would say, ‘you’re losing your sense of reality.’

  And Madge thought, yes, that’s just it. Because it is unreal, sitting behind our blacked out windows, with th
e BBC telling us one thing one day and another the next. ‘It’s not like in 1914,’ she said, ‘with all those bands.’

  They didn’t often see Tom. They heard him (such an unfamiliar sound, his high voice, in that house), and one morning, feeling she ought to do something for him, Madge came into the kitchen when he was having his breakfast and said: ‘I’m going into town today, Tom, in the car. If you’d like to come with me, we’ll see what we can find to buy you.’

  ‘All right,’ said Tom.

  ‘You go and get ready when you’ve finished your breakfast and be thinking what you might like. We’ll be leaving at half past nine.’

  Tom sat in front with Wren, Madge behind. Wren guided the little car even more slowly and carefully than usual because of the rain and it took them nearly an hour to get there, an hour spent in almost total silence. Only Wren ventured along a couple of conversational paths:

  ‘Terrible weather for flying,’ he remarked, but his voice was drowned by the whine of the windscreen wipers so Madge didn’t hear and Tom was preoccupied scanning the hedgerows for German helmets. Later, when they were entering Norwich, Wren said to Tom: ‘I’d go to Denny’s if I were you.’

  ‘What’s Denny’s?’

  ‘It’s a sort of bicycle shop, I think you’d call it, but they got a nice collection of odds and ends in there, torches and pocket knives and …’

  ‘Torches are no good. You can’t get no more number eight batteries, that’s what my Ma said.’

  ‘I think Denny’s is a good idea, though,’ said Madge. ‘Let’s drop you off there while I go and do my shopping and by the time I get back you’ll have chosen something, won’t you?’

  ‘I could look in some other shops, couldn’t I?’

  ‘Well, of course, go wherever you like, but we’ll meet back at Denny’s.’

  Denny’s was, as Wren had said, a bicycle shop, and the first thing that caught Tom’s eye was a bicycle.

  ‘Thinking about Christmas then, are you son?’

  Mr Denny had been watching Tom fingering the bike. Now he moved out from behind his counter, smiling.

  ‘How much is it?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Seven pounds thirteen, that one.’

  Tom walked away from it and began looking up and down the shelves. Mr Denny moved up behind him. Because you never knew with young lads in a shop like his. My kind of stock’s so vulnerable, he always explained, it’s tempting providence you might say, but what can I do? You’ve got to display these kind of items. Mind you, they seldom take things when they come in on their own. It’s the gangs you have to watch – dare each other, I suppose.

  ‘Looking for anything special, son?’

  ‘They said I could choose something.’

  ‘Did they now? Well, and how much did they say you could spend?’

  ‘Dunno, Sir.’ (Told that he should address the Colonel as ‘Sir’, Tom now used it on everyone.)

  ‘A birthday, is it?’

  ‘No. They just said I could have something.’

  Mr Denny sniffed. The boy’s voice, the length of his sleeves, too short by several inches, his reference to ‘they’ – all spelled ‘vacuee’ in his opinion. And his opinion of ‘vacuees’ was low, decidely low, ‘because I’ve seen with my own eyes the trouble they can cause and the dirt on them …’ He’d need watching, this one, and closely, Mr Denny decided. Best to get him out of the shop as quickly as he could.

  ‘I can tell you what I’ve been selling a lot of,’ he said, ‘catapults.’

  He produced a box of them.

  ‘Superior type, aluminium, these. Very popular with the older age bracket.’

  ‘I had one of them once, but it got broke,’ said Tom.

  He didn’t like Mr Denny. It would have been nice to look up and down the shelves, but not when he was being followed like this and shown things he didn’t want. A man came into the shop, asking for a valve for a bicycle pump, so while Mr Denny was putting on his glasses to look for the appropriate box, he scuttled out into the rain. Mr Denny took off his glasses and smiled at the customer.

  ‘You can tell ’em a mile off, can’t you? Funny, isn’t it?’

  But Tom did ride home clutching a parcel. When Madge had come back, her red umbrella buffetted by the driving rain, her stockings spattered, she’d been surprised to see Tom standing outside Denny’s shop, sheltered a bit against the wall, but his hair and clothes very wet.

  ‘You should have waited inside,’ Madge said. ‘I’m sure Mr Denny wouldn’t have minded.’

  ‘Couldn’t we go to some other shop?’

  ‘Yes, of course we can, if you like. Didn’t you see anything in Denny’s?’

  ‘I know what I’d like,’ Tom said flatly. ‘I’d like a drawing book and some colours.’

  Once back at the house, he ran inside before anyone could tell him to be sure and take off his wet things. He went straight to the ballroom, running all the way, eager to sit down at the long table and begin.

  Tom always drew what he could see. When he tried to sketch out something that was just in his head it seemed to go wrong. At school they’d all been asked one morning to paint pictures of their mothers, and Tom had gone to work confidently, certain that what he could ‘see’ in his mind his hand could reproduce. But the painting, it seemed to him, turned out nothing like his Ma. She stared out at him with a blank look, and her mouth – something had gone very wrong with her mouth – it looked more like a wound.

  So now he looked round the room and decided to start a picture of Hans, on whose head he’d put a china pot to act as a helmet. He drew him striding out, not standing, legs together, as he was, and he drew Roger and Norman a little way behind him whispering together. There was only one bit of pure invention in the picture: he drew in a small black dog and labelled him DICK. After that Dick became part of Tom’s world. Sadler bought a cheap bowl for the dog and Tom painted his name on it.

  Betty came and told him that his lunch was ready, but he asked her to tell Vera that he wasn’t hungry.

  ‘Suit yourself, Tom,’ Betty chimed, ‘but she’ll be after you!’

  He didn’t mind. At home he’d always had to make do with five colours, rather short ones in a cheap box. Now he had a big, flat tin of sharp crayons, arranged so that dark blue faded into sky blue and sky blue into apple green and green into yellow and so on, right across to purple. Tom couldn’t remember owning anything – except maybe the goldfish – he’d liked more. Even the paper Madge had bought him was of wonderful quality, thick and very white. He wanted to make picture after picture, so he sat there all afternoon and his wet coat and socks and shoes dried on him.

  That day was Sadler’s day off. He stayed in his room for most of the morning, glad he’d made no plans, feeling tired. Under his window, the fruit trees glistened in the rain, their leaves almost gone. Sadler wished he had a fire in his room, a warm centre to huddle by. The house was always deathly quiet up on his landing. Looking out was like being suspended in silence. And by noon, he found himself listening avidly for the sound of a voice, Tom’s hopefully. But it was as if the whole house slept.

  So Sadler did what he’d never intended to do: he went to the drawer where he kept his personal correspondence and picked up a letter that lay on top of the pile. Then he took down his mackintosh and went out.

  He caught the twelve thirty bus into the village. Sitting at the back where it was the least draughty, he pulled the letter out of his pocket to read.

  Dear Mr Sadler,

  I haven’t been up to the Hall again. I don’t think Colonel and Mrs Bassett like me coming. I expect they find me terribly interfering. I don’t mean to be, of course, I’m just doing a job. But I am anxious to know if everything is all right, because I feel very responsible for Tom, having persuaded the Bassetts to take him. This is why I am writing to you, and I hope you won’t mind. Do you think you could find the time to visit me on one of your free days? There is a lot I would like to ask you and as I say I don’t want to come up
to the house too often.

  I look forward to hearing from you,

  Yours sincerely

  Mary Reader

  10 Wirrals Cottages,

  Hentswell

  Sadler hadn’t replied. He hadn’t thought about the letter again until that morning had found him cold and a bit lonely and with nothing to do. He’d imagined suddenly that Miss Reader’s cottage would be warm at least and that he could sit in front of a fire while he talked to her. And it was something to do. He never interfered with the rest of the staff on his days off. Let them muddle on without me, was his policy and he never strayed from it, even if he stayed in. On a fine day, he might have waited till Tom came back and gone for one of his walks with him, but the rain looked set in.

  The bus got him to the village too quickly. When he got off, he stood for a while in the bus shelter, wondering if, after all, he’d just have a beer at The Fox and wait for the bus back. It was only the thought that he could warm himself by a fire that made him set off down the street.

  Opening the door to him, seeing him standing hunched in his mac, Miss Reader found herself trembling. It was so unfair of him to surprise her like that. She hated surprises. She tried to steady herself as she took his mac and showed him into her living room. A bright fire burned there.

  Sadler noticed her nervousness and was embarrassed by it.

  ‘I won’t stay long,’ he said.

  He went to the fire and stood in front of it, warming his hands.

  ‘What can I get you?’ Miss Reader asked. ‘I always wish I was one of those people who made marvellous home-brewed wine, but I never seem to have time, and this kitchen is so tiny! But I’ve got sherry. You could have sherry if you like.’

  Sadler accepted. He liked sherry. There was always a bottle for him and Vera at Christmas and the two of them drank it with relish, wondering why, when it was so enjoyable, they didn’t do it more often.

  Mary Reader had planned Sadler’s visit. She’d imagined how she would make him feel at home, make him see that she wanted to get to know him – as a friend, and some day, if he could come to believe in the friendship, as a lover. Tom was just an excuse, a very convenient one, for bringing him here. And now, there he stood, in her living room, but all she could find in her head were the wrong words.