Free Sadler's Birthday by Rose Tremain

out round the house like moulting feathers. With her German name and her Cockney accent, nobody ever knew where she came from, only that she’d been head kitchen maid at a Mrs Burgess’s before coming to Madge.
    Betty asked her one evening: ‘Tell us about your old man, Vera.’
    She hadn’t looked up from her knitting.
    â€˜I don’t talk about ’im, Betty.’
    And she never did. In all those years Sadler had never learned his Christian name.
    Sadler watched Mrs Moore begin to bustle about. He remembered now, with dismay, that he’d meant to ask her to cook him some breakfast. He’d forgotten and now it was too late. Of course he wasn’t really hungry. There was no worm eating for him in his belly. He believed he could have nothing all day and not notice.
    â€˜It’s a lovely day,’ Mrs Moore said.
    â€˜Cold, wasn’t it, coming up?’
    â€˜Yes, a bit nippy. Frost all right last night.’
    â€˜Snaps the heads off the crocuses.’
    â€˜Oh no. They’re a picture down the drive. If I were you, I’d get out on a day like this. You could go and have a look at the crocuses.’
    â€˜Are the daffs out?’
    â€˜Won’t be long.’
    Sadler nudged the sleeping dog with his foot. The dog didn’t stir.
    â€˜Do him good, a walk.’
    â€˜Do you good, I wouldn’t wonder.’
    He hadn’t been out for days. Too cold. He had felt like he felt when he was ill, glad to sit still near a fire, sit still and let his body rest. The thought of bundling it up in an old coat, boots and a scarf and sending it out to totter on the frozen ground was unbearable. He’d begun to wonder if he’d ever go out again. But it was nice to see a sun for once, and it was a long time since he’d been down the drive, he might enjoy it.
    â€˜I think I will go out.’
    â€˜I would, Sir.’
    â€˜I’ll take the dog.’
    â€˜That’s it.’
    â€˜Better get dressed up, hadn’t I? Catch my death like this.’
    â€˜Finished with the tea, then?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    He got up. He made his way back up the stairs to the Colonel’s room. There was quite a feeling of warmth in it now because he’d left the electric fire on. It was a well insulated room, with all those cupboards, and the sun was now shining on the carpet and over the bed in great yellow squares.
    There had been a time, when he was very small, he supposed, when he had expected the sun to be more or less everywhere inside a room, like it was outside, and it puzzled him that it only seemed to come in in squares. And why, more distressing still, was there always dust in a sunbeam? He’d been afraid of dust. He didn’t know where it came from but whenever he saw any he’d imagined it growing like a fungus, piling up higher and higher until it smothered things. It might have been because his mother had stolen Great Expectations from the library at Milord’s house and read it to him, a little bit every night when they were in bed. And he had been terribly, mortally afraid of Miss Havisham and the ghastly room where her wedding breakfast lay mouldering. Usually when Annie read him books – and she did this quite often, taking one carefully from the library shelves, hiding it under her mattress and then slipping it back when they’d finished it – he wanted to be the boy or the man in the story, but after seeing Miss Havisham’s dusty room he never wanted to be Pip.
    Sadler dressed carelessly, noting but untroubled that from day to day he put off having a bath. Old men look dirty, even when they’re scrubbed and powdered, that was his view, and he and the dog could live quite happily with the smells his body harboured. Anyway, it certainly didn’t matter what he put on: old viyella shirt – the Colonel’s or his? Baggy trousers, brown corduroy with whole furrows worn away on the bottom; his thickest