Sadler's Birthday Read Online Free PDF

lost the key. He cursed. Time was when all the keys of the house were kept in a tin box in the Colonel’s room and carefully labelled. But that was long ago. He hadn’t seen that box for years.
    He turned tail and limped down the stairs. I can remember every inch of that room, he thought, no need really to see a thing when you can remember it so well. All the same, it would have been nice to touch all the old things.
    â€˜That you, Mr Sadler?’
    Oh she was there then. Couldn’t be Sunday, thank Jesus.
    â€˜Mrs Moore?’
    She was standing in the hall.
    â€˜I’m a bit early, Sir. Hope you don’t mind.’
    There was something he wanted to ask her, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what.
    â€˜I’ll get on, then.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜I’ve not a lot of time this morning. I’ve got my sister staying and I promised I’d take her into town.’
    â€˜That’d be nice.’
    â€˜I like to get in before the crowds.’
    â€˜Oh yes.’
    â€˜That seems to get worse ’n worse, Saturday.’
    â€˜I suppose it would.’
    And then she was gone, tying her apron round her as she bustled off, leaving Sadler standing at the bottom of the stairs.

II
    Annie Sadler, sitting at her father’s upright piano, liked to dream. She played with a lot of feeling, so her teacher said; a little more practice and she’d be very good. So sometimes Annie dreamed of fame and sometimes of love.
    Greg Sadler, her father, was a piano tuner. He made a fair living in those distant days, when all respectable homes had a piano. December, of course, was the busiest time of year for him, when Christmas crept into sight and families began to think of the sing-song they’d have – Good King Wenceslas and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Uncle George or Aunt Beatrice playing, wrong notes and all but so good for the spirit. He’d be working twelve hours a day sometimes in the weeks before Christmas, come home sick and tired of the sound of the darned instrument, to find his daughter playing away in the front room in the dark, always Chopin and with a wrapt expression on her face. ‘Lord,’ he’d say crossly, ‘what’s wrong with supper then, Annie?’
    But he spared her no love. He’d brought her up on his own and in her he had vested a formless kind of hope. She wasn’t pretty of course. Never had been, even as a little girl. Her face was much too long and her hair so fine and wispy you’d fancy the wind could blow it away. But she had a stillness about her that folk found appealing. And she was all he had.
    They lived in a small house in a clean little town in Suffolk that went about its business with a ponderous slowness, found a respectable response to the ringing of its Sunday bell and prospered a little from its recently built pork pie factory. Annie liked it. By the time she was sixteen, in 1898, she recognized that to walk down its short main street was to her like being held between two familiar, comforting arms and she vowed she would never leave it. Oh she was timid all right, far too timid and shy for a girl of her age, Greg Sadler was aware of that. But to snatch her up and drop her somewhere else would have caused her such pain that he never would have suggested it, although, as her aunt declared on a visit from London, it might have done her the world of good.
    She wasn’t particularly clever. At school she’d done her best with the books she’d had to read, but the music lessons were all she cared about. In the summer, on hot days when all the windows were open, the whole street could hear her playing. ‘I don’t know,’ Greg used to mutter to her as she sat there, ‘what are we going to do with you, Annie girl?’
    Do? In Annie’s mind doing was never in question. She’d kept house for her father from the age of eleven when her mother had died and she could