Sadler's Birthday Read Online Free PDF Page B

imagine no other life. One day, perhaps, the notions she had about love would crystallize and she’d choose a man to bear the burden of them. But until that day came – and somehow it seemed a long way off – she’d pray to God every Sunday to let her stay put.
    Annie had loved her mother. When she died, she wanted everyone to be silent and let her just think , not weep or say she was sorry, but just sit quietly and think about it until she had thought it out. Silence, occasionally, was like darkness: it erased things. And once the funeral was over, the relations come and gone and the cakes eaten, Annie and Greg never spoke about it again. By doing this, they believed they would forget. The less they talked, the less they remembered; the more the silences accumulated, the more the image they wanted to rub out grew invisible.
    When Annie was sixteen and a half, her music teacher got married. Woman of fifty, single all her life, what business had she going off and doing a thing like that? But there she was one fine morning at St Teresa’s Church in her best blue silk, all the neighbours agog, hanging out of windows, and the groom, they all said, very neatly dressed and handsome for a man of his age. The town wished her well, but not without raising an eyebrow or two and everyone declared it impossible to think of a wedding gift, for what could she need at her time of life? Annie gave her a cushion cover she’d worked herself during the evenings when Greg had been too tired to let her play the piano. Then with dismay she watched her leave the town a few weeks later, bound for London.
    For day after day the piano stayed closed. Greg Sadler breathed a sigh of relief, and as if to compensate for what he knew was a selfish feeling, started to tell his daughter what a sweet sight she was these days, looking so grown up now, dressing so nicely on the little money she had, and wouldn’t he just know it if some young lad mightn’t come along who’d take a fancy to her. But with the departure of the one person who had encouraged her, Annie’s favourite dream had fled. She couldn’t play any more and, though she tried, she couldn’t talk to her father as they sat face to face in the evenings. She knew he was trying to cheer her up with all his compliments and she loved him for it, but it did no good. She felt her little girl’s soul going brown.
    Then Greg Sadler met Betsy Elkins, Annie’s friend, in the main street one morning, and Betsy, all gay ribbons and pink smiles, said: ‘Tell you what’s happened, Mr Sadler . . .’ Greg, late for a client, harassed and hot on this sunny day, stood prisoner for a full ten minutes while Betsy told him that her favourite uncle and aunt, not to mention her handsome cousin Joe, had been left a house no more than three minutes walk from her own, the little one with the yellow windows opposite the church, and wasn’t it exciting they’d be moving in any day.
    Escaping from her with the merest: ‘That’s fine, Betsy’, Greg pondered this information on his hurried way to work. He would, he decided, take the opportunity of a glance at young cousin Joe, and if he liked the look of him, make sure that Annie was dressed up and looking her best the first time she met him. Not a word to Annie, of course. Let her brood over the ugly piano. For wasn’t the first day of spring, arriving undreamed of in winter’s cold lap, the more welcome because unannounced? Greg Sadler loved metaphors and was very proud of this one. So proud, in fact, that he wished he could have said it aloud to someone listening.
    But then on the first of June, before Greg had gone to work, Betsy Elkins came tapping at the Sadlers’ front door. Today was the day of the great arrival, she said, and she was so excited at the thought of their coming that she’d love her friend Annie to share it all with her, especially as couldn’t