by Rose Tremain
‘I’m afraid you quite surprised me! I was trying to do some baking, but I’m hopeless at it, I really am!’
‘What were you making?’
‘Oh it’s called Madeira cake, I think. Mrs Dart next door gave me the recipe. But my cakes always turn out soggy, and it’s not the oven or anything, it’s me.’
She handed Sadler a glass of sherry.
‘Aren’t you going to have any?’ he asked.
‘Shall I? I can never make up my mind about it. Sometimes it seems to taste horrible.’
‘Have half a glass with me, and then I’ll be getting along.’
‘Oh no. You mustn’t go. You’ve hardly got here, and it isn’t often I have a visitor. There were things I was going to ask you, I’m sure there were. I think I warned you in my letter, there were lots of things … and now I can’t think of one.’
‘About Tom?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s with me most of the time.’
‘Yes, I thought that’d be it.’
‘Doesn’t fuss me. We’re good friends.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘He’s found quite a bit to interest him, too. The old ballroom up there’s full of odds and ends they’ve put out of the way. Kids see a whole world in a place like that.’
‘The Bassetts don’t mind?’
‘Oh no. They like to feel he’s occupied.’
‘Things are in such a muddle – with the schools. None of them seems to know how many they can take. But we’ll find a place for him after Christmas, I’ll make myself responsible …’
‘He’ll survive.’
‘If you could, of course, find the time to do a few lessons with him …’
‘He’s best doing what he wants.’
‘Well, yes, I’m certain you’re right. As long as he’s not unhappy, that’s our main concern, isn’t it?’
Sadler said nothing and Miss Reader was anxious to scramble together some more words, but searched and found none. She hated the taste of her sherry, but sipped it for something to do, taking sip after sip until it was all gone.
‘Well …’ said Sadler.
‘You must think me terrible,’ she began in a rush, ‘getting you here like this and not remembering any of the things I was going to say. I always find that if people take me by surprise I’m quite tongue-tied. My parents were always doing it, springing people on me, friends of theirs, people I couldn’t get on with. It was terrible. Even when I wanted to like them, there was always someone to say something clever, just when I’d said something banal and everyone would laugh. I’ve always found it … so difficult … and I couldn’t be more wrong for the job I do, when so much depends on being able to talk to people, to persuade them. I really couldn’t be more wrong, don’t you think?’
Sadler noticed that her hands were shaking and that her face worked itself into extraordinary contortions all the time.
She reminded him of a girl he’d met when he was working near Scarborough. Clare. She worked in a shop where he bought his tobacco. Clare Morley – or was it Mosley? Pretty till she spoke and then with the movements her face had to make to get the words out, suddenly ugly. She’d gone on and on at him, kept calling, kept sending him things, kept asking him why, when all the other men she’d liked had loved her, couldn’t he love her? She wasn’t a virgin, she whispered to him. Lost all that when she was still in school. And she wasn’t one to start hearing wedding bells after the first kiss, like most of the girls she knew. So what was stopping him? What in the world could he be afraid of, when there she was fancying him like she’d never fancied anyone, mad for him and asking no promises from him, just his love. It was a persecution. Desire would never come, Sadler had known. Drunk or sober, he would never be able to make love to Clare. In the end, because he couldn’t touch her, because he couldn’t bear to touch any part of her, he had to tell her that he hated her, tell her and see her face crumple and watch the anger she felt rise until she struck out and hit him. He never saw her again. She disappeared. He asked no one where she had gone and no one told him. He was thankful.
Sadler brought his attention back to Miss Reader. She was looking at him quizzically, the flow of words stemmed, a kind of exhaustion in her eyes. He moved away from the fire. Really it had been his only reason for coming, but now he was finding it too hot.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she began again, ‘not so much about Tom as about you. I’d felt that … oh, I don’t know what I felt, I just wanted to get to know you. And I don’t usually. I can’t bear it usually, the idea of getting to know someone. It always seems to take so long and leaves you feeling so puzzled.’
Sadler nodded. It was difficult to answer her. He didn’t even know if she wanted an answer.
‘But I thought it might have been nice, just to try, just to …’
He wanted to stop her talking now because he was embarrassed for her. How could she, with her seesaw of a voice, bear to humiliate herself?
‘The war, you see. The war changes things, don’t you think? It brings people together, breaks down barriers. It has to, doesn’t it, because if we’re all divided from each other even at home, how will we fight?’
Sadler just nodded.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘no time to spend today. I’ll have to be getting back.’
‘Yes of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pressure you. I hope you don’t feel I was pressuring you, do you?’
He smiled at her.
‘I enjoyed the sherry.’
It had almost stopped raining. A pale sun slanted down on to the street and it shone. Sadler felt his spirits soar as he stepped out into it and he walked, enjoying the fresh air, the few hundred yards to The Fox, where he ordered a beer.
He got back late, on impulse taking the bus to Norwich in the afternoon, spending the rest of the day looking round the market. Not so late that he couldn’t serve dinner to the Colonel and Madge, though, because this was one of the Colonel’s rules – everything had to be back to normal in the house by dinner time, or he couldn’t eat.
There was a small package addressed to Sadler in the servants’ hall and recognizing the name on the label, he knew it was the catapult he’d ordered for Tom. But the boy was in bed now. He’d give it to him in the morning.
As Sadler took the coffee into the drawing room, he noticed that a rough wind had begun to buffet the house. All you needed was a wind like that at this time of year to send the last leaves flying off. When it died down, winter would be there. Madge shivered by her fire.
‘I forgot,’ she said, ‘to ask you, Sadler. Did you have a nice day?’
‘Yes, thank you, Madam. I met our billeting officer in the village. She enquired after Tom.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I told her he was doing fine.’
‘Good. He is, of course, isn’t he, Sadler? I’m afraid he finds it very difficult to talk to me and the Colonel. I took him to Norwich today and he hardly said a word.’
‘He talks to you, Sadler, doesn’t he?’ asked the Colonel.
‘Yes Sir. When he feels like it.’
‘Well, damn right! No sense in gabbling just for the sake of it. Worse than the silent ones, the gabblers.’
‘He asked me for a drawing book,’ said Madge.
‘Did he, Madam? He told me once that he liked drawing.’
‘Jolly good, I’d say,’ beamed the Colonel. ‘Budding artist in the family – make a nice change!’
Sadler was tired. He said goodnight, told Vera to go in a bit later for the coffee tray, and went upstairs. When he got to his landing, he noticed that there was a light under Tom’s door. He considered going back down to get the catapult, but then he thought, no, better to wait till the morning when he can take it outside and play with it. But he knocked on Tom’s door all the same. Sometimes Tom went to sleep with his light on, forgetting even to draw the blackout curtains.
‘Who is it?’ Tom called.
‘It’s me, Jack.’
When Sadler went in, he saw Tom lying on the floor in his vest and pants, propped up on one elbow which also held steady his drawing book. On the floor by him were his crayons and four pictures he’d already finished.
‘I can draw Norman and them without looking now,’ he announced.
‘With your eyes shut?’
‘Don’t be soft! Without copying, I meant. Just from my head.’
‘Let’s see …’
‘Look what she got me.’
He knelt up and held out the box of crayons for Sadler to see.
‘That’s nice.’
‘Yeah.’
Sadler bent over him to look at his pictures. They were all of the ‘others’ – Hans in his helmet, Soapy with his shop, Ginger, Roger and Norman side by side.
‘They’re very good, Tom.’
‘You don’t think so, really.’
‘I do. I think they’re good pictures.’
Tom watched Sadler looking at his drawings.
‘I hoped you’d come so as I could show you.’
‘Did you? Well, I’m glad you’ve got a drawing book. I would have bought you one if you’d asked me.’
‘You got no money, have you?’
‘Enough to buy you that.’
Tom was sitting up now, watching the curtains move, listening to the wind.
‘I don’t like that,’ he said after a while. ‘It’s spooky.’
‘The wind?’
‘I don’t think it’s just a wind. There’s things out there, ain’t there?’
‘Only the usual things – trees and owls and—’
‘I don’t want to be in the dark.’
‘There’s nothing to hurt you, Tom. It’s not even a storm.’
‘I don’t like it. I’m not going to sleep.’
‘All right,’ Sadler said, ‘come on in to my room till it goes away.’
‘Could I?’
Tom got into Sadler’s bed and Sadler took his jacket and tie off and lay down beside him. They lay there in the darkness listening to the wind.
‘I like it in your room,’ Tom said.
‘Do you? Well, I’ll tell you,’ Sadler whispered to him, ‘when I was a kid. I used to share a bed no bigger than this with my Ma, whose name was Annie, in a room very like this one. There was even a picture in it a bit like the one on the wall just above us – two little kids on a seesaw in this green meadow – and my Ma used to say they’d put it there to remind me to work hard, like in the rhyme.’
‘What rhyme?’
‘Seesaw, Margery Daw,
Jacky shall have a new master.
He shall have but a penny a day,
Because he can’t work any faster.’
‘That’s baby’s stuff, i’nt it?’
‘Not really. It’s what you sing when you’re on a seesaw, but when I hear kids singing that, I know they sing it without knowing what it means – just a song to move by, something to say, I suppose, because your body likes moving like that and you want to sing.’
Sadler closed his eyes. Very gently, he took Tom in his arms and began to kiss his face.
VI
A note on the table from Mrs Moore read: Your lunch is in the oven – stew. Sadler examined the careful round writing and thought wearily of the eternity of a Sunday that would follow this day. Mrs Moore, birdlike, would be singing to Jesus: he would eat beans and fart to break the silence.
Well, why think about it? Years ago he believed he had accepted loneliness, even used it well. His senses had sharpened, he had understood more than dreamed. Quite the reverse now. He fought it. He tried to smother it, curled up stupidly in the blanket of the past. The blanket made his skin itch and he scratched like a monkey. ‘Just as well no one comes here any more,’ he said aloud. ‘Frighten the children I expect I would.’
‘I don’t mean to, of course,’ he heard the Colonel say. ‘I try to be gentle with the boy, but he’d run a mile rather than talk to me.’
The Colonel again. The Colonel standing awkwardly there in the kitchen, the hairs in his ears bristling. He’d come that evening to find Tom. He was going to shoot a rabbit or two, he said, and thought the boy might like to come along. But Tom had eaten his tea and run off.
‘I was good with men, y’know Sadler,’ the Colonel said dejectedly. ‘But youngsters … I don’t know …’
He’d gone off on his solitary shoot and returned an hour later with a smile and three dead rabbits.
‘If there’s one job turns my insides,’ remarked Vera when she saw them, ‘it’s skinning poor little bunnies.’
Sadler considered eating some of the stew. The airing he’d given himself seemed, now that he’d rested a little, to have strengthened him. But he still wasn’t hungry. And anyway, if he could put off eating for an hour or two the afternoon would seem shorter. Nowadays he disliked afternoons. They reminded him that they were his ‘free time’ – the hours between half-past-two and half-past-four, when the Colonel dozed and Madge went round the garden with her secateurs – and ‘free time’ had no meaning any more. ‘I’m all yours,’ he used to tell Tom when Tom outlined, as he often did, some scheme – a new dam, a bonfire to build, ‘but woe betide you if I’m late for serving tea. Don’t know which’d be worse, Vera’s moaning or the Colonel’s fidgeting.’
In the summer Tom became an inquisitive rat, pink feet squelching up and down the river banks. Several times it got too dark to find his shoes. He’d come back with his shirt tied round his waist, telling Sadler that he should have stayed and never mind the Colonel’s tea.
‘Because it was great when the sun went. Some ducks came …’
But if he had the time Sadler followed him, the apprentice in river lore where Tom was master. And one afternoon, when Madge and the Colonel were in London and there was no tea to serve, they decided to walk fast, not stopping too long to look at things on the way, and go further up river than they’d ever been before. They walked for three hours. Tom mocked Sadler for being out of breath. Then they found the boats. They were tied to iron moorings, the property of a white painted pub. A neat notice informed the public that the landlord would rent out the boats at sixpence an hour.
‘Cor!’ said Tom. ‘Could we?’
‘Take a boat?’
‘I got sixpence.’
‘Then we could.’
Tom had learned to row on funfair lakes. Deftly, he put the oar into the rowlock and steered the little boat out into the stream, his eyes as bright as the water. Sadler watched and revelled in his pleasure. Suspended on the quietly moving river, the green banks sliding past, he experienced such an absolute contentment that he tried to hold his breath, frightened that the least motion might shatter it.
‘Wheee!’ Tom laughed out. ‘Watch me, Jack! Look, we’re going ever so fast. Watch me!’
Well, he’d watched hadn’t he? For five years, every movement, every grin, and passionately for every sign that Tom loved him. Now and then, Tom came to his bed, never guiltily, often oddly amused by Sadler’s little rituals of passion, discovering his own sexuality with surprise and without emotion, then to fall asleep without a word while Sadler, tremblingly awake, held him. If he leaves me, Sadler thought then, what will be left? But each time that he’d held Tom he’d known that it would come soon enough, the parting. The war wouldn’t last for ever.
And so one day it came.
Thirty-one Tom had said she was, Mrs Trent, Dolores, Dolly to all – Tom’s Ma. She came driving down in a sports car one Sunday morning, a man at the wheel beside her, a Jack Flash of a man, shoulders padded, hair brilliantined, Charlie Ackroyd all over again. It was May 1945.
Madge was in the garden, going round in her linen hat, picking early roses, stooping before she picked to smell each one. She always chose roses for their scent, not for their colour or the arrangement of their petals. The scent of certain roses filled her with a sadness that she found exquisite.
‘Just smell this, Sadler,’ she called as she saw him cro
ss the lawn towards her. ‘Do just smell!’
Sadler bent to sniff the flower she was holding.
‘Isn’t that perfect, don’t you think?’
‘It’s lovely, Mrs Bassett.’
‘And now the war’s over I can believe in the smell of a flower again, do you know what I mean?’
He did, he supposed. The funny things Madge said were occasionally rather pleasant. Looking up at her, he noticed that under the ridiculous hat she was pinker than her rouge.
Sadler cleared his throat.
‘We’ve got visitors, Madam.’
‘Oh?’
‘Tom’s mother and a gentleman friend.’
‘Good lord!’
‘Yes. Quite unexpected isn’t it? She didn’t even write after the first year.’
‘What does she want, Sadler?’
‘I didn’t ask, Mrs Bassett. I imagine she wants to take Tom home.’
The Colonel was in London. As Madge took off her hat and patted her hair she thought how extraordinary it was that he always seemed to be away whenever something cropped up. Not that he, who had once handled his men so superbly, was very good at talking to people any more (in fact he didn’t really talk, he growled), but he remembered for her all the things she wanted to say and had forgotten. And she knew that there was quite a lot that ought to be said to Tom’s mother, if she could only think of it.
‘What can I say, Sadler? I mean …’
‘It depends why she’s come, doesn’t it?’
‘Well, yes, but I do feel she ought to be reproached. I mean, it’s terrible the way she’s treated him, isn’t it?’
‘We don’t know the circumstances, do we?’
Madge touched Sadler’s arm.
‘You’re always so ready to be kind, Sadler aren’t you? It’s very nice. But there’s no doubt in my mind that she’s behaved very badly, very selfishly. I can’t let Tom go without saying something, I really can’t. I mean one owes it to Tom, don’t you think?’
Madge handed Sadler her basket of roses as they crossed the lawn to the house.
‘Shall I take your hat too, Madam?’