Sadler's Birthday (25 page)

Holding on to the wall, Sadler got up, brought his head up slowly and looked around him. His hand was clutching the key so tightly that it was digging into his palm.

Then he walked to his door, put the key in the lock and felt it turn. The door handle was stiff – always had been, hadn't it? But the door moved, and now there he was. He had only to reach out a hand to put on the light.

Cobwebs touched his arm. As the light came on, he saw a huge spider scurry in sideways panic under the bed, disappear into the darkness that held – must hold! – something that lay stinking there, hiding from him and from the light, but God Jesus making such a stench that he wanted to turn and run.

Sadler stood and stared at his room. The walls were yellowed, stained ochre, the damp pushing out wet fungus where the eaves met them. The bed, brass black, its filthy mattress half eaten away, was all that the room contained. The window, grey-curtained by spiders, had been robbed even of its wooden rail that had held once some patterned fabric, too short for the window, but offering a garden for his eyes to wander in – urns, wasn't it, and roses on a grey-green sky? No sign of a rag, even, that might have been those curtains, and there, on the wall above the bed where the picture should have been, a space, just a square of wallpaper paler than the rest.

Sadler knew he should have turned away. But he had to find the picture – only that – and it occurred to him that it might just be there, in that space under the bed. Because it could have fallen off the wall, and even if the glass were broken and the thing faded to shadows, he might find something in it, surely, that he could bear to look at.

He shuffled forward through the dirt, knelt down, brought his head down till his cheek was almost resting on the floor, and slowly his eyes began to search the space. Something bulky lay in the dirt, completely still and yet moving itself, caressed over and over by white maggot fingers. The body of a rat. There was nothing else there, only more of the dirt and droppings that covered the whole floor. But then, yes. He could see something – under one of the bed legs, a wedge of sorts, a piece of paper, was it, folded? Sadler stretched out his hand and tugged it free. He knelt up and shook the dirt from it, unfolded a once bright little picture of sailboats on blue water. It was a card. ‘To wish you well' it said, and underneath, in Annie Sadler's writing, ‘Happy Birthday, Jack'.

That was it, then. His old room, the little central cell around which his life had arranged itself, he had let die.

Holding his nose, he got up, turned, slammed the door shut and locked it and limped as quickly as he could down the back stairs. He went into the kitchen, opened the back door and began calling to the dog. Tomorrow, he thought, he would have to give it a name.

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Epub ISBN: 9781446450475

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Copyright © Rose Tremain 1976

Rose Tremain has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Vintage in 1999
First published in Great Britain by Macdonald in 1976

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780099284376