Sadler's Birthday (13 page)

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.

There was a butler at the new house, a Mr Keynes, who had once been flattered by Madam by saying that she thought him ‘a very perceptive man'. So, as if striving perpetually to demonstrate his powers of perception, not only to Madam but to the servants as well, he made constant observations about everything and everyone. After only one week he pronounced about Jack Sadler. ‘I'd call him a goer,' he said. But the other servants couldn't agree. Because the boy seemed miserable, a burdensome presence in the household, and they eyed him as a traitor. It was a household with Rules, they tried to make him understand, the most fundamental of which insisted that Servants Look Cheerful At All Times. And it was true that, just as a class of schoolchildren see a longed-for outing snatched away because one of them is deemed unworthy of it, so the servants at Thripton House came under general disfavour if they were not seen to be ‘pulling together'.

Madam, conveying displeasure in every one of her tight little movements, would tread and retread the hearthrug in the servants' hall, sprouting angry little phrases as if she were handing out sticks to a line of hands assembled there. She kept going up and down, up and down the line, deciding she hadn't given them enough, up and down, up and down, while they stood silent and still, taking the sticks, watching her bundle of them get smaller and their own begin to grow. Then she'd send them away. She had more, the bundle wasn't gone yet, but they'd have to wait for the rest, come back another day.

‘So do you understand, Keynes?'

‘Madam.'

‘Discontent in the servants' hall . . . I'm relying on you . . . as head of the staff . . . and the others must clearly understand . . . to report anything like that to me . . . at once . . . never to my husband . . . because he mustn't be bothered with petty things . . . to me . . . do you understand?'

‘Yes, Madam.'

Then when she'd gone, Keynes waited for the silence to settle before he turned to them all.

‘Sadler.'

‘Yes, Mr Keynes.'

‘I'd like you to pay special attention to what I'm going to say.'

So Jack stood, fiddling with the smart buttons on his jacket, and heard that on no account were any of the staff to let their feelings interfere with the jobs they were paid to do. ‘And that means, Sadler . . .' He jerked his head up as his name jumped out at him. ‘. . . that whatever you might feel about coming here, about us, about your employers, you are from now on to show us that you can behave as a pleasant human being. I have no quarrel, none at all, with the way you do your work. I would go so far as to say that you do most things very carefully and well. But you must hold your head up, Sadler. Hold your head up!'

The others were all looking at him. Confusion mounted inside him, squeezing his breath, burning his cheeks, till it welled out of him. Tears. Keynes cleared his throat. Someone, one of the young housemaids, put an arm round his shoulder.

‘Cheer up, love. No one's hurting you.'

But they were. The next day he had a letter from his mother. ‘Oh, Jackie,' it said, ‘I put
The Mill on the Floss
back on the shelf today. We never got to the end, did we? It wasn't one of your favourites, I know, especially after I told you George Eliot was a girl, but we always had a rule, remember, to finish the ones we started . . .' No anger in her letter, just resignation – ‘I put
The Mill on the Floss
back on the shelf.' So you see, she seemed to be saying, you feel things much less, in fact you hardly feel them at all, if you don't let yourself be angry. And things improve. The maids, for instance, they, neat as pigeons in their grey dresses and white collars, singled him out for their maternal affection after that talking-to. Mary, the fattest of the pigeons, smuggled out titbits to him, picked from the dishes sent back from the dining room, and took to giving him this little peck of a kiss on the top of his head. So he grew to like Mary, fat, talkative Mary, the antithesis of Annie Sadler.

There was a lot of chores to be done. Walking all day long, up and down and backwards and forwards through the rambling house, fetching and carrying logs and coal and milk churns and sacks of potatoes and other things that were heavy and made him go slowly; sometimes just a message in his head and then he ran, as fast as he could, so that he wouldn't have time to forget it. His favourite job was cleaning shoes. They were all lined up for him, early each morning, on a table under a very bright electric light bulb in the cellar. It was his first job of the day and he did it with faultless care. And Madam's shoes, all different colours, with tall, square heels and little spaces at the end for the toe to peep through, he marvelled at them. Because not only were they incredibly shaped, sprouting soft little straps and little buds of buttons, but they never seemed to
need
cleaning. Day after day they came down to him and he tried always to make them shine more, but months passed and they were still perfect, still hardly worn.

‘Madam,' Keynes told him, ‘says you clean her shoes very nicely. So keep it up, keep up a high standard in everything you do and we shall all be pleased to see you get on.' Then he added: ‘And I'll give you a tip, Sadler. If you want to make friends in this life, always tell others the good that's said about them and think very carefully before passing on the bad.' And two things occurred to Sadler: first that Mr Keynes looked at him strangely, and secondly that his mother never thought, let alone said, anything critical or unkind about anyone and yet she had no friends, only Aunt Betsy, and Sadler knew that Aunt Betsy had betrayed her.

Rather than think any more about Keynes, he decided to piece together what he could remember about Betsy. Keynes had sent him off to the village Post Office with a parcel for London and he walked slowly, so preoccupied with his thoughts that he went past the Post Office and almost through the village before he remembered the package and turned round.

There had been the shop first of all. A big shop with a shiny wooden floor, smelling of camphor. And rows and rows of little drawers, some just above the floor, accessible to his inquisitive hands and holding, he knew, untold treasures. Very occasionally, he'd managed to pull one of the drawers out and spill its contents on to the floor – buttons or ribbons or cards of poppers and hooks and eyes, bundles of elastic, balls of darning wool. But then he'd be snatched away, held firmly on his mother's knee, fidgeting there, growing hot and wet and thirsty. The talk had gone on and on, interrupted now and then when a customer came in, and out would come the bales of material, fingered and taken to the daylight, finally unrolled in great coloured rivers on the long counter. The shop had been a tantalizing prison, a treasure chest of untouchable things, including, alas, the salmon-pink lady in a bride's gown who stood in the window.

And Betsy. What sign had there been that her mouth that was never still, the red mouth that spilled out a waterfall of words, would one day utter a betrayal? Had it indeed ever been uttered? Or was it something more hidden than words and more terrible? When Jack thought of her face – and he remembered it quite clearly – he saw it smiling. It smiled and smiled on them, on him and Annie and her quiet utterances and then it was gone. He knew it had existed. If the shop hadn't been real (and because, after a while, they never went there again, he began to wonder about this), the teashop was.

It had been an ordinary day off, starting early as usual because all the servants, except Mr Knightley, worked till breakfast time on their days off, and following the pattern that such days took – Jack being dressed up in his best and walking hand in hand with Annie down the long drive to catch the nine o'clock bus into town. On the way, Annie promised him treacle tart for lunch. She said they'd spend the morning looking at the shops as it was near Christmas and then they'd meet Aunt Betsy at twelve, in the teashop.

They arrived first, on the dot of twelve, and waited. Jack was hungry and a lady in black kept on coming up and asking them what they wanted and each time she came Annie said: ‘I think we'll wait a bit longer.'

‘Ma . . .'

‘We're waiting for Aunt Betsy, Jack.'

‘Couldn't I . . .'

‘She'd think we were horrible if we ate before she came.'

So by the time she arrived with her smile, he hated her. She smelled of perfume, obliterating as she breezed in the smells of the teashop.

‘Hello little Jacko!'

But the lady in black saved him by coming up again, not polite any more, quite rude this time, thrusting a menu card into Betsy's hand before she'd arranged herself on her chair, then standing by the table, refusing to go before they'd told her what they wanted to eat. Annie ordered Welsh rarebit for him and treacle tart to follow.

‘No tart today.'

‘Jackie, no treacle tart.'

So now the day was spoiled. He'd quite liked the lady in black to start with, but suddenly he hated her. As if sounding out his doom, he heard Annie say: ‘He'll have rhubarb and custard.'

But the Welsh rarebit came quite quickly and it was nice. He felt his anger begin to slide away as he ate it. By the time he'd finished he felt quite happy again and wanted to talk. But as usual, even as she ate, Betsy's mouth was pouring out a torrent of chatter, pausing only for a smile and a nod or a ‘did you, Bets?' from Annie to go rushing on, an impenetrable flood. It seemed to Jack that everyone else in the teashop was caught and swirled along in it, their own safe harbours of conversation abandoned. And then, quite suddenly, it stopped and, from watching the other people, Jack turned back to see Betsy with her face bright red, looking away from his mother whose eyes were wide, wide and her mouth gaping. There was absolute silence. Knives and forks clinking, but no other sound. He panicked. Before he had noticed it, he was up and tugging at Annie's arm.

‘Let's go, Ma.'

But instead of getting up she just patted his hand.

‘It's all right, love.'

He stood by her, not knowing what to do. Slowly, the sound of conversation started up again and then, with his head turned away, he heard Betsy say: ‘It was none of my doing, Annie. I told John, I've a right to choose whom I please. But he says no. And honest, Annie, I don't know why, but I couldn't keep on at him, because what if he turned round and said no wedding then?'

‘But we've been friends a long time, Betsy.'

‘I know. That's what I told him. I told him it didn't matter to me what you'd done, we were still friends.'

‘So?'

‘So he said . . . what I told you . . . he said he didn't want me associating with you any more, that's what he said.'

‘He's got pretensions, has your John Thomas.'

‘No. It's just that he doesn't know you, that's all. It makes all the difference to things when you know someone.'

The rhubarb and custard came. The lady in black put it down in front of Jack with a smile. And that was all he remembered. He couldn't remember saying goodbye to Betsy and in the afternoon, quite a fine one, they went down to the canal to look at the houseboats and he forgot about her. An old man popped up from one of the boats and invited Jack to come and have a look at it and Annie sat on the bank waiting for him till the old man tired of his questions and told him to run along.

After that day, Betsy with her red mouth and all her thousands of words disappeared. They quite often went to the teashop again, but she never came. Jack hadn't liked her, but friends were important, he sensed, like collections of fag cards, and as far as he could tell, Betsy was the only one his mother had ever had.

Jack posted the parcel for London, enjoying, as he entered the Post Office, its musty smell. Mrs Hood, sparrow-like behind her grid, always took off her glasses when someone came in, to make sure she knew whether to smile or not before she put them on again to read the labels on the old books she kept her stamps in. She reserved one of her nicest smiles for ‘the little ones', as she called children, kept pieces of liquorice (that often went stale when days went past and no ‘little ones' came in) in a bag under the counter to push under the grid to them with the change. She disapproved of children running errands, told her sister Mabel she considered it only fair to pay them as one would a servant – hence the sweets. She smelt of lavender and there was a compact greyness about her that Jack liked. His only regret was that it was liquorice, not barley sugar that came nudging towards him.

‘Why don't you keep barley sugar, Mrs Hood?'

‘What, dear?'

‘It'd be nice if you had barley sugar.'

‘Would it?'

‘I think you should.'

‘Well, it's always been liquorice. The little ones seem to like it.'

‘I like barley sugar better.'

‘Well, I could buy both, I suppose, couldn't I?'

‘It might be too expensive, wouldn't it?'

Mrs Hood smiled. ‘I'll see what I can do.'

It was always blinding, the sunshine, when you came out into it again after the darkness in the Post Office and Jack had begun to wonder how Mrs Hood's eyes, pale as they were, could adjust themselves to its brilliance. He worried that all the years of taking them backwards and forwards from dark to light, not to mention the on-off, on-off of the spectacles, were slowly dimming their sight.