The Servants Read online

  The skateboard was not the problem, he suddenly understood. The person standing on top of it was.

  By the time he’d finished considering this insight from a number of angles, he was sufficiently enthused that he almost wanted to get back down to the seafront and try some more, rain or no rain.

  But when he looked up, the old lady was asleep.

  There was no tentativeness this time. He got up, took the key, and went out into the corridor. It might be that today was the day when she found out what he’d been doing. It didn’t matter.

  He had to do it anyway.

  THE corridor beyond the door felt as still and dead as it always did at first, but Mark wasn’t fooled this time. He didn’t hang around, but went straight along it to the kitchen. He poked around for a few minutes, hoping he might find another souvenir, but wasn’t surprised when he quickly began to hear—or feel—a certain kind of sound plucking at the back of his mind.

  It began to get warmer, very quickly.

  Then there was a loud noise, the range cooker belching and coughing. Suddenly there was a fire alight in its lower half, though the rest of it remained dusty and covered in rust. Each hacking sound seemed to send thick puffs of ash out into the room.

  The color of the air had begun to change too, but the room was still deserted. Mark was just about to see if anything was happening in the main passageway, when he realized someone was standing behind him.

  He turned to see the young housemaid. Emily. She was looking at him with something halfway between curiosity and exasperation.

  “You again,” she said.

  “I’m from upstairs,” Mark offered quickly.

  “I know that,” she retorted. “You’re Master Mark. Martha said so. But the family’s guests went home, back up to London.”

  “They did,” Mark said hurriedly. “But…I’m staying a few extra days. To be with”—he racked his brains, trying to remember the name he’d heard, and then finally got it—“Master Tom.”

  She kept looking at him, and Mark thought she was wondering about his clothes, which he realized were very different from anything he’d seen down here.

  “It’s what they’re wearing in London,” he said hopefully.

  Then there was a sudden loud slamming sound, from the front of the house, and he realized that what he’d seen in her face was not curiosity, after all. She was exhausted, and worried. Maybe even frightened.

  “Quickly,” she said, taking his hand. “You’ll not want to be found down here. Not today. Mr. Maynard…he’s not in a good humor.”

  She pulled him across the kitchen toward the low door to one of the food storage spaces on the other side of the room. “Go in there.”

  Mark ducked into the tiny room. The first time he’d been in here, with the old lady, it had been empty. Now the shelves were lined with bottles and small wooden boxes and things wrapped up in brown paper and tied with string. Over everything lay the unhealthy film he’d seen before, as if something was seeping out of all of them.

  He’d barely got in position when he heard an angry voice in the kitchen.

  “Upstairs?” the man said, and for a horrible moment Mark thought he was referring to him. “And what might Mrs. Wallis be doing upstairs? I instructed her to meet me here, did I not? Am I mistaken on that point?”

  “No, Mr. Maynard,” said a voice dutifully.

  Mark recognized it—it was Martha. He moved so that he could peer out.

  The cook was standing at the range. She looked exhausted and out of sorts, but was moving quickly back and forth between the oven and the table, which had now reappeared in the center of the room, ferrying food from one to the other and back again. Behind her, on the far wall, he noticed for the first time a pair of sinks. One was already piled high with filthy pots and pans.

  “So why isn’t she here?”

  “Don’t rightly know, Mr. Maynard,” mumbled the cook.

  The butler stood fuming as the cook and Emily and then the other girl, the one dressed in gray, moved quickly back and forth. As Mark watched, he saw Martha seemed to be making several meals at once—or one after the other. At first she seemed to be making breakfast, but then the things she was moving and chopping and cooking looked more appropriate to dinner. Then she was cutting sandwiches, but immediately afterward she was grunting with exertion as she came trundling back from the meat store with a huge joint of beef. Even from where he was, Mark could smell that something was wrong with it. In the meantime, the bells on the far wall had started to ring. At first just one of them—then all of them at once.

  Mr. Maynard stood absolutely still in the middle, not helping with any of it, merely becoming more and more angry. As Mark watched, he realized that something was going even more awry with the cooking range, too, and with the candles. Something, at any rate, was producing more and more smoke, the black and viscous kind he’d noticed on his last visit, the kind that hung in the air and slowly drifted down to the floor to gather in clumps.

  And not just down to the floor, either. It was settling on Martha’s shoulders, and on the table, falling on top of the food.

  Suddenly, the butler turned toward the end of the main passageway. “At last,” he said. “Now we shall see what’s what.”

  Mrs. Wallis stormed into the kitchen. “Mr. Maynard,” she said, evidently already furious. “You and I need to have words.”

  “It will be my pleasure,” the butler said, and by now he too had piles of gray-black soot on his shoulders and hair. “I have been waiting for you. For quite some time.”

  “I am the housekeeper here,” Mrs. Wallis said. “That means I am in charge of this house, in case you’d forgotten. What do you think gives you the right to talk to madam behind my back?”

  She stood right in front of Mr. Maynard, her chin aggressively thrust out and up at the taller man. She didn’t seem to notice the green-black liquid that was seeping out of the butler’s hair, running in thin lines down his face.

  “You are quite mistaken,” he said. “It is you who have overstepped your position. And not for the first time.”

  “You, sir, are a fool,” Mrs. Wallis spat, turned on her heel, and walked out.

  Mr. Maynard followed, and their argument echoed loudly as they went.

  Mark gave it a few seconds before coming out of the storeroom. Emily was nowhere to be seen. The bells on the wall were still all ringing, chaotically and out of sync, making a jagged mess of sound that felt like someone jabbing sharpened pencils in your ears. The air felt thick and thunderous, as if a storm was seeping in from outside through the brickwork. The kitchen floor was now so covered in piles of soggy black soot that it was hard to stay on your feet.

  Martha was crying.

  Mark was struck dumb by the sight. This huge, capable-looking woman, still moving back and forth between the range and the table—and the meat store, and the dairy store—had tears running slowly down her face. Where first her movements had been sweet and sure, now she seemed to be knocking into things, as if everything was conspiring to get in her way.

  It wasn’t just her, either. The girl in gray came running into the kitchen from the main corridor, looking harassed and fit to drop. She slipped and nearly wound up on her back. Mark noticed for the first time that the point at which the passageway met the kitchen was smooth and rounded, too. As he looked around, he realized every single corner and join in the quarters were the same, all the hard edges taken off to promote speed. As if everything that happened down here was part of a huge machine.

  “You must go,” said a voice, and Mark turned to see Emily trotting quickly down out of the back stairs. “Now. I don’t know what would be worse—Mr. Maynard finding you, or Mrs. Wallis.”

  She tried to pull him toward the back stairs, but Mark dug his heels in. “I can’t go up there,” he said.

  “If you’re quick, no one will see you,” Emily insisted.

  Her voice sounded muffled, as if tired with trying to force its way through the
heavy, sickly air. She also seemed offended. “Just this once, a young master can go the servants’ way, surely?”

  Mark wanted to tell her that it was nothing to do with not wanting to use the servants’ staircase, that he thought it was beneath him—but that he didn’t know what would happen to him if he did.

  Thankfully, he didn’t have to. The sound of the bells suddenly doubled in intensity, and Emily darted around him toward Martha. The cook’s face was dry again, and she looked resigned and focused, as if trying to run a race from a long way behind the other runners. She was holding a tray of food out in one hand, ready for collection, her eyes already on the next task—though surely it couldn’t be time for another meal yet?

  “Shoo,” Emily said, as she went. “Go now. Please.”

  Mark went—but not the back way. He ran through the kitchen toward the front passage. As he passed the side corridor, he heard the sounds of argument from the butler’s room, voices raised but held just in check, so that the lower orders would not overhear.

  He heard also a brittle crash from the kitchen and knew what had happened. Emily had slipped, or tripped—and the tray of food had fallen to the floor.

  The voices in the butler’s room suddenly went quiet.

  Mark started to run, before they could come storming out to visit their ire upon the staff in the kitchen. He grabbed the door and yanked it open without even considering whether the old lady might be awake.

  It didn’t matter—didn’t even matter if she found him out. He just had to get out of there before he was seen. He was finding it very hard to breathe. The air was full of thick fog, which felt dry as it went down, but came back up like deep coughs of dark phlegm.

  As soon as the door was closed behind him, the texture and color of the air became clear, as if it had been flipped to its mirror image. He went into the old lady’s room. She was still asleep. He replaced the key and left. He didn’t want to talk to her.

  He didn’t want to talk to anyone, except his mother.

  SHE was still in bed when he got up to her floor. David was sitting in the other room. His mother was awake, but looked very tired. When she put out a hand to take Mark’s, he noticed for the first time how thin her wrists had become. She smiled up at him.

  “How was your day?” she asked, and Mark realized this was about the only question she ever asked of him now.

  “Fine,” he said, which was how he always replied.

  “Is it okay if you find something to eat downstairs tonight? I’m feeling a little worn out.”

  Her voice had changed somehow in the last week. It had always been firm, the edges of each word sharp and defined. Now it sounded as if she was sitting in a cloud. Sitting or half-lying at an angle that constricted her chest, preventing her from getting enough breath to push each word out properly.

  He nodded and glanced out into the other room. David was still sitting where he had been, looking out at the night.

  “Are you going to have to go into the hospital?”

  His mother didn’t answer for a little while.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  fifteen

  But when he went up to her room at mid-morning on the next day, she was in her dressing gown, sitting on the couch. David was in position in the armchair, once more standing guard.

  “Is the doctor coming?” Mark asked.

  She shook her head.

  “So you’re going to get dressed and go to the hospital?”

  “I feel a little better today,” she said. “I think I’ll see how it goes.”

  She didn’t look better. The light had gone out of her skin and it looked gray. She didn’t seem better at all.

  “But you said—”

  “If she needs to go, she’ll go,” David interrupted. “Now why don’t we—”

  “If she needs to?” Mark said. “Don’t you think she needs to now?”

  “Your mother has—”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Mark shouted. “Why don’t you make her go? She needs to go to the hospital, not sit here in this horrible room. Why are you stopping her?”

  “He’s not stopping me,” Mark’s mother said. “I’m doing what I—”

  “He should be making you,” Mark said. “He should be making you go.”

  HE tried calling his father from a pay phone near The Meeting Place. He should have done this before, he realized. His father would have made his mother go to the hospital, if he was here. He would have argued with her, and in the end she would have given in, as Mark had heard her do before. If David wasn’t going to make her do what she should do, then Mark’s proper father would have to, from afar.

  His father wasn’t at home, however, and when Mark tried his cell phone, it rang once and then went to a dead tone, as if the phone wasn’t working anymore. He called the home number again and got no answer, and was about to leave a message when he realized he didn’t know what to say to a machine.

  He slammed the phone down and stalked off to the beach. There had to be something he could do about this, before David’s influence made things even worse. Mark could try arguing with her, but he knew it wouldn’t work. He was only a kid, and grown-ups never took seriously what children had to say, even if they were obviously right. He might have tried calling his grandparents—even mothers had to listen to their own mothers, sometimes—but of course they were dead. He didn’t have a number for his mother’s best friend, and knew that calling her wouldn’t do any good anyway. Even if she listened to him, Mark’s mother wouldn’t listen to her.

  He’d been sitting there for nearly an hour, staring out at the sea and turning things over and over in his head, when he heard the sound of someone walking over the pebbles toward him.

  HE came down until he was level with where Mark was sitting, and stood there, about six feet away.

  “Is she going to the hospital?”

  “No,” David said.

  “Why? Why isn’t she going?”

  “Because she doesn’t want to.”

  “You’ve got to make her go. She won’t listen to me.”

  David sat down on the stones, hooked his arms around his knees, and looked at him.

  “She does listen to you, Mark. Listening to you doesn’t mean just doing whatever you say. But she listens, and she cares what you think. I care what you think too, but…”

  “No you don’t,” Mark said angrily. “You think I’m in the way, you just want to change things until they’re exactly the way you want. You want everyone to do what you want.”

  “I really don’t, Mark.”

  “So what is it with the Diet Coke, then? Why are you doing that?”

  David looked confused. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I mean. Don’t pretend. You know I like Diet Coke. I always ask for it. So why do you never bring enough?”

  “Because it’s heavy,” David said.

  “What?”

  “It’s heavy. Your mother drinks a lot of water. The stuff out of the taps here doesn’t taste so good. She doesn’t like it, anyway. So every time I go to the supermarket I cart back about ten big bottles of mineral water. Plus food. Plus the other things we need. It’s hell to park, so I walk. I bring as much Diet Coke as I can carry.”

  “Rubbish,” Mark said. “You just don’t think I should drink it.”

  “Mark, I don’t give a damn about you drinking Coke. Your mother’s not too keen on it, as a matter of fact, but I figure whatever, so it’s got aspartame in it, big deal—far as I know that never actually killed anyone. Fruit juice is more natural, but it’s full of sugar and will rot your teeth, and I have no idea which is worse in the long term. I didn’t have time to take a parenting course before all this happened and so I’m vague on that stuff. Probably you should be drinking bottled water too, if anything, but you’re a kid and so you’re going to drink whatever you want, and frankly…I just don’t care.”

  Mark stared at him, not knowing whether to believe this, and feelin
g he’d somehow ended up way off track, that David had lured him away from what was important.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You want more soda, I’ll bring more soda. It’s not high on the list of things I’m prepared to worry about right now.”

  “Yes,” Mark said, seeing his opportunity. “You should be worrying about how to get her into the hospital. So they can make her well.”

  David bit his lip, and looked out at the sea for a moment. Something softened in the set of his shoulders.

  When he turned to look at Mark, the cast in David’s eyes caused the words to clog in Mark’s throat.

  “Your mother’s got cancer,” David said.

  MARK listened, without saying anything, as David explained his mother had something very serious, a disease down in her lungs. She wasn’t just sick. This wasn’t something like a cold, or a stomach bug, which you withstood for a while and then it went away, like the sun came up in the morning, no matter how long the night had seemed. This was something that could make the night come and stay.

  “She doesn’t want to go to the hospital again,” David said. “If she did, we’d be back in London, not down here. The hospitals are better up there. Especially for this. But that’s not what she wants.”

  Mark didn’t believe him. “But why? If she’s so sick?”

  “Because of what they would do.”

  “What do you mean? They’d make her better.”

  “They’d try, yes. That’s their job. But they only have one way to do these things, and it’s like dropping a house on a dog to try to cure its fleas. You may kill the fleas, but maybe not—they’re tough, and they’re small, and they’re hard to catch. And the dog—” He shrugged.

  Mark didn’t understand a word of what he was saying. He just knew that it sounded completely stupid. Hospitals were where you went when you had something wrong with you. They made you better. That’s what they were for.

  “I told you, Mark, it’s her dec—”

  “Where do you even come from, anyway?” Mark said, suddenly incoherent with frustration. He pushed away from David, a couple of feet away across the pebbles. “What are you doing here? Nine months ago it was just me and her, and then suddenly you appear from nowhere and everything changes.”