Read Online Sadler's Birthday by Rose Tremain - Free Book Online Page B

Sadler?’
    â€˜Don’t know. Remember other things from that time. The bit of garden. Absolutely square. I’m sure it was absolutely square.’
    â€˜Well, I expect it would be, wouldn’t it, in a terrace. They make them like that, don’t they?’
    â€˜But not my old Gran’pa, though I often think it might come to me one day, what he looked like.’
    â€˜You were telling me, Sir, when he died . . .’
    â€˜I was three, I think. Or four. Perhaps I was three-and-a-half. Halves are important to kids, aren’t they? They – she – told me afterwards. It was summertime.’
    â€˜More tea, Mr Sadler?’
    â€˜Oh yes. Yes. “Thank God for Tea.” That’s what Vera used to say. She didn’t have much to thank God for.’
    Mrs Moore didn’t like it when Sadler mentioned God. She rebuked him often, with her top lip drawn in. And Sadler often gave way to the temptation to tease her about ‘your friend Jesus’, thinking to himself: don’t know why I do it really, when it hurts her. But it amused him.
    â€˜Oh I tell you what, Mrs Moore . . .’ Sadler remembered the lost key.
    â€˜What, Sir?’
    â€˜The rooms on the top landing. I was going to have a look up there this morning, but the room was locked.’
    â€˜Which room, Mr Sadler?’
    â€˜It was the room I had, you see. In the Colonel’s day, it was my room.’
    â€˜Which one was it, Sir?’
    â€˜The second to the left of the back stairs, looks out over the orchard.’
    â€˜Well, I go in all the rooms quite regularly to dust cobwebs. I don’t remember any being locked.’
    â€˜I locked it, I think. A long time ago. Probably about two years ago.’
    â€˜You couldn’t have done, Sir. I must have cleaned in there a fair few times since then. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? You told me when I came you wanted all the rooms dusted from time to time.’
    â€˜Yes. It’s just . . .’
    He could summon no recollection, none whatsoever, of putting the key away. But perhaps he had decided one day not to go in there any more. Because in that room, it seemed to him, all the past was held.
    â€˜It’s just that lately, I find I . . . being on my own . . . have to think about something, you know. There’s the dog, you’ll say, won’t you? All his little needs to be attended to. I’m not very good with the dog any more. I forget things. I forget what time he’s supposed to eat. Just old age, isn’t it? But I tell you what you’ve got a storeful of when you’re old – the past. The longer you hang on, the bigger the store gets.’
    â€˜Well, I always say some things are best forgotten.’
    â€˜I daresay that’s true. Bet you enjoy thinking about when you were a girl.’
    â€˜I’m too busy, Mr Sadler, for that kind of thing.’
    â€˜Are you? Too busy, are you? Well, that’s good. There are plenty of days when I’d like to be busy.’
    Mrs Moore had finished her tea. She was looking at the kitchen clock.
    â€˜I must get on. I’ll be late for my sister.’
    â€˜Oh have some more tea. Mrs Moore.’
    â€˜Never more than two, dear. It’s bad for the veins to drink too much tea.’
    â€˜I’d like another cup.’
    â€˜Help yourself, Sir. Just leave the pot and I’ll wash it up before I go.’
    Sadler finished the pot. Thank God for Tea. Hardly a week in her scurrying life when Vera hadn’t blessed her Maker for giving her that. Nowadays, Sadler thought, it was the kind of saying they printed on the front of T-shirts. But Vera wouldn’t have understood that.
    Vera had always reminded Sadler of a chicken, from that first evening when he talked to her – scrawny neck, bony, yellowish arms and long fingers that pecked at things when she was nervous, hairpins that fell