The Servants Read online

  Originally, the idea had been that this would be Mark’s room, but soon after they’d got down here, it had become obvious his mother wasn’t finding the stairs easy. She needed somewhere on this level to spend time, because it drove her nuts to be stuck in the bedroom all day, and so Mark had wound up in the room underneath, which was supposed to be a sitting room. He didn’t mind, because his mother needed it to be this way, but it still felt as if he was camping out.

  Mark kissed her on the cheek, trying to remember how many days it had been since she had left the house. This room looked nice, at least. There were four or five lamps, all casting a glow, and the only pictures in the house were on its walls.

  She smiled up at him. “Any luck?”

  “A little,” he said, but, having been trained by her to be honest, he upturned his palms to reveal the grazes. “Not a lot.”

  She winced. Mark noticed that the lines around her eyes, which hadn’t even been there six months ago, looked a little deeper, and that there were a couple more gray hairs among the deep, rich brown.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll get there.”

  “Sure you will,” said a voice.

  David came out of his mother’s bedroom, looking the way he always did. He was slim and a little over medium height, and he wore a pair of neatly pressed chinos and a denim shirt, as usual. His nose was straight. His hair was floppy but somehow neat. He looked—according to a friend Mark had back in London, whose uncle worked in the stock exchange and so had experience of these matters—like someone for whom every day was casual Friday. He did not look at all like Mark’s real father, who had short hair and was strongly built and wore jeans and T-shirts all the time and in general looked like someone you didn’t want to get in a fight with.

  David was drying his hands on a small towel. Mark found this annoying.

  “Let’s see,” he said, cocking his head at Mark.

  “Just a graze,” Mark muttered, not showing him. “What are we eating? Can we order from Wo Fat?”

  The question had been directed solely at his mother, but David squatted down to talk to him. This made him a good deal shorter than Mark, which seemed an odd thing to do. Mark wasn’t a little child.

  “Your mother’s not feeling too hungry,” David said, with the voice he used for saying things like that, and just about everything else. “I went to the supermarket earlier. There’s cool stuff in the fridge. Maybe you could forage yourself something from there?”

  “But…” Mark said. What he wanted to say was that he’d done that the previous evening, and the night before, not to mention both lunchtimes. Also that frequently ordering food in from Wo Fat, a Chinese restaurant up on Western Road, was traditional when they stayed down in Brighton—though this was a ritual that involved Mark’s real father, not David.

  Mark caught sight of his mother, however, and didn’t say either of these things. She smiled at him again, and shrugged.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Tomorrow, maybe, okay?”

  Mark nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He was furious at David for putting his mother in this position, for making her be the one who apologized, when Mark knew it was David who didn’t really approve of takeout and who felt she should only be eating very healthy things. Who just didn’t…get it.

  Didn’t get anything. Shouldn’t be here.

  “Right—maybe tomorrow,” David said unconvincingly. “Who knows—perhaps we’ll even go out to eat.”

  Mark sat on the couch and talked with his mother for a while, and then they watched some television together. She moved the blanket so it lay over the two of them, and it was nice, even though David was hovering in the background doing whatever it was he always did.

  “You must be getting hungry, aren’t you?” his stepfather said, after half an hour.

  Mark turned to stare at him. His mother was looking tired, and Mark knew what was being implied. But it wasn’t David’s place to say it, and Mark wanted him to realize that. David just looked back with eyes that were equally unblinking.

  Mark muttered good-night and took himself downstairs, where he made a ham sandwich in the kitchen, added a couple of cookies, and took the plate into “his” room, along with the last available Diet Coke.

  There was no carpet on the floor of his room and nothing on the walls, and it was not terribly warm. The sash window did not fit snugly and rattled a little sometimes in the night.

  He sat with a blanket around his shoulders and watched his little television for a couple of hours, but soon he felt tired from another long afternoon of falling off his skateboard, and went to bed.

  WHEN he dreamed, it was of being back in the house in London. Though that house had been a lot smaller than the one in Brighton, it had been a real home. The place where he’d been born, grown up, had friends to visit, waited for Santa Claus to come every year—even after his father had explained that there was no such thing.

  Mark dreamed he was in the back garden there, kicking a ball around with his dad. They ran around together, knocking it back and forth, faster and faster. Mark was better at it than he’d ever been before, always managing to return his dad’s searching passes, earning grins and laughs and shouts of approval for each time he sent it singing back. They both started panting, getting out of breath but keeping at it, knowing there was some kind of force acting through them now, something outside their control, that they had to keep playing while it lasted, no matter how tired they got.

  Then Mark’s father kicked the ball in a completely different direction.

  They hadn’t been making it easy for each other before, but at least he’d been kicking it somewhere Mark had a chance of getting to. This last kick wasn’t a pass he was ever going to be able to intercept. The ball went sailing clean over the fence on a trajectory that was low and flat and weirdly slow. It flew silently, disappearing into a twilight that arrived suddenly and yet then felt as if it had been there forever. Mark turned his head to watch it go, wondering if he was ever going to be able to get the ball back. He watched also because it meant he did not have to look back at his father’s face, in case he saw there that this kick had not been an accident, that his dad had deliberately kicked it over the fence.

  Mark kept waiting for the sound of a crash, of the ball hitting a window—or at least the ground—but it never came.

  When he eventually did turn back, he realized his father had gone, could never have really been there, in fact. Mark was no longer in the garden back at the old house, but on the promenade down by Brighton seafront, next to one of the super-benches that had old metalwork walls and a roof and places where you could sit on all sides. It was dark, and he was alone, and there was nothing to see or hear except the sound of the sea.

  Then Mark realized he was lying rather than standing, and that he was not nearly cold enough to be down by the sea in the middle of the night: that the sound he’d interpreted as the sea was in fact the rumble of distant traffic on the road, heard through a window. He came to understand that in reality he was in his bed in David’s house. The room was very dark but for a thin strip of pale light that seeped through a gap in the curtains from a streetlight outside in the square. Though it wasn’t as cold as the beach would have been, it was still far from warm, and he huddled deep into his bedclothes, lying on his side, facing out into the room.

  As he started to drift toward sleep again, he thought he could hear a different noise. At first it sounded like a soft and distant flapping, but then he realized it was people talking somewhere. At least two voices, maybe more. He wondered if it was his mother and David, upstairs, though it must be very late by now, past the middle of the night. His mother needed a lot of sleep at the moment. If she was awake at this time, it was not a good thing.

  He opened his eyes a little.

  And saw something pass in front of his face.

  It was there for barely a second, something that looked like the back of someone’s hand, moving past the side of the bed within a coup
le of feet of his head. A sound that was like the swish of fabric.

  Then he heard footsteps, and though they must have been from upstairs, they did not sound like it. They sounded more as if they had traveled across the floor of his room, from just beside his bed to the doorway, and then disappeared into the corridor and away toward the back of the house.

  Then everything was silent, and still.

  three

  The next morning, Mark left the house early, skateboard under his arm as usual and a bolted breakfast of cornflakes taken alone in the silent kitchen. He was still feeling fuzzy from the dreams he’d had in the night, and wanted to get out into the cold winter sun. The house felt dark sometimes, even when all the lights were on.

  He shouted upstairs to say he was going out. David appeared quickly at the top of the stairs, finger to his lips. His mother was asleep, evidently, and her keeper wanted Mark to be quiet.

  He shrugged angrily—he was supposed to tell them where he was going, wasn’t he? David was forever saying so—but shut the big front door behind him quietly on the way out. The sky was wide and sharp blue again, though something about the quality of the light suggested there might be rain later. You could see that kind of thing more easily here than in a city. Better get his practice done early, then, rather than spend the morning walking up and down. He was getting a little bored with the seafront walk, if he was honest. When they used to come here, they would go to the Lanes and look at the shops for at least some of the time. Even though few of them held things of any interest to him, he wanted to do that now. He was tired of this stretch of the promenade. He was tired of spending so much time alone.

  He was just setting off down the slope toward the road when something caught his eye. He turned and saw that the door to the basement apartment was open. He went to the top of the metal staircase and peered down, curious.

  He couldn’t see much beyond the door, which was open about a foot and revealed a short, narrow passageway beyond. Then he heard a noise from within. It sounded like someone struggling with something.

  “Hello?” he said.

  There was no answer.

  He went down the steps until he was in the basement courtyard. His head was only a couple of feet below the level of the sidewalk here, but it felt strange, as if he was descending into a whole other part of Brighton. He stood at the door and heard the noise again.

  “Hello?” he repeated.

  Still no response, and he was about to go back up the staircase when he heard the sound of shuffling feet. He took a hurried step back from the door, suddenly feeling like an intruder.

  A woman appeared out of the gloom.

  She was old, and short—about the same height as Mark—and a little stooped. Her hair was pure white and her face was white too and looked as though it was made of paper that had been scrunched up in someone’s hand and then flattened out again. She was dressed all in black, not the black of new things but the color of a dress that had once been black but had been washed and folded and worn again, many times. The sleeves were fringed with lace. Her wrists were like sticks poking out of them, and the hands at the end were covered in little blotches, brown and purple against ivory skin. In one of these she was holding a lightbulb.

  “Who are you?”

  “Mark,” he said hurriedly. “I…I live upstairs.”

  The old lady nodded once, and kept looking at him. He realized she was not so much old as very old, and also a little scary-looking. When she blinked, she looked like a bird, the kind you saw on the seafront, stealing bits of other people’s toast.

  “I was walking past and I heard a sound, so…I wondered if someone needed help.”

  “You must have good ears,” she said. Her voice was dry and a little cracked. “Do you have good ears? Do you hear things?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so,” Mark said.

  The old lady held up the lightbulb. “Trying to change this. Can’t get the chair to stay steady. That’s all.”

  “I could help, if you wanted?”

  She smiled, and for a moment looked less intimidating and also younger. Certainly not a day over eighty-five.

  She turned and walked through the door, and Mark followed.

  THE corridor was very narrow indeed, but after only a couple of feet there was another doorway. Mark realized that the first passageway was an addition, part of the courtyard that had been enclosed to provide somewhere to hang coats and store umbrellas. Beyond the inner doorway was a second corridor, which was much wider and evidently lay directly underneath the hallway of the house upstairs.

  On the right side of this short corridor was a door, and Mark glanced through it as he stepped into the gloom. In a space about a third of the size of the room he was using upstairs, the old woman had crammed a single bed, two narrow armchairs, a small table, a bookcase, and a wardrobe. There was a tiny kitchen area under the bow-window. The furniture looked like the kind of stuff you saw outside secondhand shops, not protected from the weather and priced at about four pounds each. The light in the room was soft and dim, filtered through the lace curtains. The whole space couldn’t have been more than about twelve feet by eight, and most adults would have felt themselves wanting to stoop.

  He turned back to see that the old lady was standing by a rickety wooden chair in the passageway. A naked cable hung down from the ceiling. He took the bulb from the lady’s hand and carefully climbed up onto the chair.

  He could feel the legs wobbling, but his practice on the promenade over the last couple of weeks made him feel slightly more confident of keeping the chair upright—certainly more than the woman’s hand gripping the back of the chair did, which he felt was unlikely to make much difference if the thing did decide to tip over.

  He stretched up and unscrewed the bulb already in the fitting. It resisted, but finally came out with a rusty-sounding squeak. He handed it down to the old lady and pushed in the new one—and was startled when it suddenly glowed in his hand.

  “Whoops,” the old lady said. “Sorry.”

  He quickly screwed in the bulb before it got hot, then jumped down from the chair. He could see now that this corridor stopped after about six feet, where there was a heavy door, which didn’t look as if it had been opened in a long time. Mark was surprised. He’d assumed the old lady must have at least one more room in her apartment, maybe two—she couldn’t possibly live just in that front space, could she?

  The hallway seemed gloomy even though now it was lit. It was very dusty and there was an underlying smell, like the inside of something you were only supposed to know from the outside. There were no tiles on the floor, only battered floorboards, and the walls were dingy.

  “That’s most kind,” the old lady said.

  Mark shrugged, suddenly feeling a little embarrassed.

  WHEN he got to the place on the promenade where the other kids normally were, Mark was confused at first. There was nobody there. As he stood in the middle of the open area, he eventually remembered it was a Monday morning. Everybody else was at school, probably—which is where Mark should have been, and would be, if they were still in London. The seafront was deserted, and even the little café, which had been open over the weekend, was shut, the white plastic tables and chairs put away.

  Mark didn’t mind at first. At least he had the place to himself and wouldn’t have to worry that other boys—or girls: he’d seen a couple down here—might be laughing at him. After he’d been going up and down for an hour or so, however, he came to think maybe it didn’t work like that after all. Everything he did seemed a little more fluid than it had the day before. He still couldn’t flip the board on either axis, and every attempt ended in a hectic scrabble and the clattering sound of the board crash-landing several feet away—but on the other hand he didn’t wind up sliding along the ground as often, generally managing to land on his feet. So it was progress, kind of.

  But it felt a little pointless.

  The danger that other people might laugh at your m
istakes was precisely what made it worthwhile—essential, even—to keep on trying. That was part of why boys were such a tough audience for each other: it made you do stuff. Without this you had to do everything for yourself, and that was okay for a while but then you started to wonder why you were doing it, and why you were still so crap at it. It made you question what the point of it all was, if it just meant you were going up and down, falling off, then going up and down again. Mark started looking up expectantly when people came past, in case someone was going to wander over to his area, put down a plank and a wedge, and start doing things. But nobody did. The only people walking up and down were old men with dogs, or couples not talking to each other.

  Soon there was hardly anyone at all, as the sky got more leaden and a cold wind picked up from the sea. The skateboard just didn’t want to stay upright or carry him. All it wanted was to tip him over, as painfully as possible, and then hurtle randomly away.

  In the end it started to rain, and Mark walked bad-temperedly back to the house, past the little hut that sold sandwiches and tea and cakes regardless of what day of the week it was, and whatever the weather. You couldn’t sit inside it, but there were plastic tables and chairs arranged on the promenade to one side, protected from the wind—slightly—by sheets of yellow canvas. The café was called The Meeting Place, but today it was deserted except for a middle-aged man sitting alone at a table, looking down at his hands, an empty teacup beside him. He didn’t look as if he was expecting to meet anyone.

  When he started to look up, Mark hurried past, in case the man’s face reminded him too much of his own.

  When he got indoors, David was in the kitchen, standing in front of the fridge, staring at the contents as if he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Given that he had bought everything in there—very little of which was on Mark’s favorite-things-to-eat list—Mark thought that was annoying of him.

  “How’s it going?” David asked, still gazing into the fridge.