The Servants Read online

Mark threw his jacket over a chair. “Pretty crap,” he said.

  David watched water drip off it onto the floor. “Going back out after lunch?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s raining,” Mark snapped. “And it’s a waste of time. You might have to put up with me being in your house for a while. Sorry if that’s going to put you out.”

  “Of course it won’t,” David said. For once, his stepfather sounded irritated. “You can do whatever you want. It’s your house too.”

  “No, it’s not,” Mark said, as if he’d been waiting for just this opportunity. “I don’t live here. I live in London.”

  “Not anymore,” David said. “We—”

  “We don’t do anything. What I do is nothing to do with you.”

  “Actually, it is,” David sighed. “Your mother and I got married, Mark. Remember? You were there. That means what you do has everything to do with me. You may not like it, but that’s the way it is. We’re just going to have to work at it. It’s like skateboarding. You can’t just expect—”

  “Oh fuck off,” Mark muttered.

  David stared at him, still holding the door to the fridge, and the room suddenly felt very quiet.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to apologize for that,” David said.

  Mark had been as surprised as David to hear the words come out of his mouth, but he wasn’t going to take them back.

  “No,” he said.

  “Is everything all right down there?”

  They both turned at the sound of Mark’s mother’s voice coming down the stairs. Mark opened his mouth to say no, of course it wasn’t, how could it be, but David got there first. He walked quickly over to stand in the doorway, tilted his head up.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll be right up, honey.”

  Mark understood then what his position had become. David now stood between him and his mother. He always would. This was his house. He ruled. Whatever he wanted to do, or say, he could. There was nothing Mark could do about that. Yet.

  “Yeah,” he snarled quietly, “everything’s fine.”

  He pushed past David and into the hallway, grabbing his jacket as he went past. He could hear it was still raining outside, but he didn’t care. He didn’t want to stay in the house.

  David said something to him in passing, but Mark didn’t listen, instead yanking the front door open and running outside, this time not caring how much noise the door made as it slammed behind him. He started quickly down the steps, but they were wet, and he was moving too fast.

  On the second one down, he slipped, his foot sliding off and jarring down onto the third. He tried to keep himself upright, but his other foot was soon slipping too, and the next thing he knew he was tumbling sideways to land flat on his face, sprawled across a puddle on the sidewalk.

  The wind was knocked out of him, all at once, and with it went his anger. It was replaced with something smaller and more painful. Something like misery. He had fallen down like this several times every day for weeks, but that had been different. That was just a matter of not being able to keep his balance on the board.

  This time it felt as if he’d been shoved.

  “Oh dear,” said a voice.

  Mark looked up to see that an old woman was standing a few feet away on the sidewalk. The old woman, in fact: the one from the basement apartment. She was bundled up in a black coat, woolly and thick, and was holding a little black umbrella.

  She was looking down at him. “Horrible day,” she said.

  Then: “Are you hungry?”

  four

  While they waited for the old lady’s kettle to boil—it didn’t plug into the wall but sat on the stove—she opened the narrow door at the far end of her room. Beyond it lay a minuscule bathroom. The lady came back holding a towel. It was pale yellow and ragged around the edges but very soft, and Mark used it to dry his hands and face.

  Then he sat in one of the two chairs and looked around the room as the woman made two cups of tea. He felt odd being in here, but when he’d been lying there on the sidewalk at the old lady’s feet with the rain coming down, he hadn’t known what else to do. He couldn’t go back inside the house, because she’d seen him storming out, and also because he just didn’t want to. He couldn’t go down to the seafront—he’d get soaked.

  There wasn’t anywhere else to go. So he’d got to his feet and shrugged. The old woman held up a small brown paper bag.

  “I can never finish one all by myself,” she said. “Why don’t you come down and share it with me?”

  As she poured water into the teapot, Mark realized he could still detect the odor he’d picked up in the passageway after helping the lady fix her light. It seemed hard to believe it was coming from in here, though. Everything was spotlessly tidy. The top of the little table and the arms of the chair he sat in were not home to a single speck of dust. The bed was so tightly made that the blanket was utterly flat. The old-fashioned chrome clock on the bedside table gleamed as if it had been polished that morning. The tiny stove—which only had one burner, and a grill about a foot wide—was obviously prehistoric, but still looked as if it had been recently cleaned by a high-pressure hose.

  He couldn’t help wondering if the smell came from the old lady herself, though that wasn’t a nice thought and didn’t seem likely. It was a slightly damp, brown smell, and everything about her was dry and white-and-gray.

  There was only one picture on the walls, and it was very long and thin. It was an old painting, and showed a line of familiar buildings that all looked the same.

  The old lady saw him looking at it. “A panorama of the seafront,” she said. “Painted a hundred and seventy years ago.”

  Apart from the fact that the few people in the picture wore strange suits and top hats, or long skirts that bulged out at the back, very little about the view had changed. Mark felt obscurely annoyed at Brighton for being that way. In London, things changed all the time. They went on forever, but they changed. Here things stopped but stayed the same.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Oh, quite some time,” she said. “But no, I don’t remember it that way.”

  She put down a cup of tea next to him. It didn’t look like any cup of tea he’d seen before. It was dark brown, almost red. “There.”

  “Is that…a special kind of tea?”

  “No,” she said, lowering herself slowly into the other chair. “It’s just strong. Most people make their tea far too weak, and what’s the point in that? If you want a cup of tea, have a cup of tea. That’s what I say.”

  Next to the tea she put down a plate on which lay the contents of the brown paper bag. This was a cake, but of a kind with which Mark was unfamiliar, though he thought he might have seen things like it for sale at The Meeting Place. The cake had been cut neatly in half. Mark picked up one part and bit into it cautiously. It was hard and tasted of flour and was studded with little raisins. It was not consistent with his idea of a good time.

  “Very nice,” he said, putting it back down.

  “Keep at it,” she said. “Not everything tastes good in the first bite.”

  This sounded uncomfortably like the lecture David had been giving him upstairs, before he ran out, and Mark sat back in his chair.

  “Oh dear,” the old lady said. “Did I say something wrong?”

  THEY remained like that for a while. Mark picked up the cake again and took another bite. It still tasted odd, as if it came from a time when people ate things because they had to eat, not because they expected to get much pleasure from it. The War, perhaps, when, Mark gathered, things in general had been somewhat substandard. He liked the tea strong, though, and the third and fourth bites of the cake—by which time he’d lowered his expectations—were not too bad. The raisins were okay, at least.

  “Why were you running?” the old lady asked, out of the silence.

  He shrugged. He didn’t know what to say, and he didn’t fac
e questions like this very often. If another kid your own age asked, then you’d just say the person who’d annoyed you was an arsehole and go kick a football and by the time that was over you wouldn’t be so mad. Grown-ups never made that kind of enquiry, and it seemed unlikely the old lady would much fancy knocking a football around. “I just wanted to get out of there.”

  “Trouble upstairs?”

  “I suppose so.”

  The old lady nodded. “I hear coughing, sometimes.”

  “My mother,” Mark said defensively. “She’s not too well at the moment. She’s okay, though.”

  “And your father?”

  “He’s not my father.”

  The old lady paused, her own portion of the rock cake—that’s what it was called, apparently—halfway to her mouth. “Oh. I understood he was married to your mother.”

  “Well, yes, he is.”

  She cocked her head slightly on one side. “So…”

  “That doesn’t make him my dad. I have a dad already. He lives in London.”

  “I went to London once,” she said. “Didn’t like it much. Too many people. Couldn’t tell who anyone was.”

  “It’s better than here. Stuff happens. You can go to places.”

  Mark had spoken far more sharply than he’d intended, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she said.

  She went to the counter and poured a little more water into the teapot. She swirled the pot around, slowly, looking up through the window. The lace curtains stopped you from being able to see much, but you could tell it was still raining hard. “How long have they been married?”

  “Four months. They did it really quickly. I think he made her do it fast in case she realized what an idiot he is and changed her mind.”

  “Is he an idiot?”

  “Yes. He really is. He’s really annoying, too. He’s always trying to make me do things, and getting in the way. He doesn’t know anything about us. He doesn’t understand.”

  The old lady just kept swirling the teapot around. The room was warm now, almost stuffy. The clock on the bedside table ticked loudly. Each tick seemed to come more slowly than the last tock, and Mark suddenly felt very homesick. He didn’t want to be here, in this tiny apartment, in this house, in this town. He wanted to be back in London, in his old room, watching television or playing a video game and knowing that his mother and real father were downstairs. Even if once in a while voices had been raised, it was home. It had been real. This was not. This was a place where you just marked time.

  When was he going back to school? When was he going to see his friends again? When was he going to see his dad?

  He needed to know the answers to these questions, but every time the clock ticked it seemed to get louder, as if each tock was a bar in the cage that held him here. He grabbed the remaining chunk of his portion of the cake and put it all in his mouth at once, chewing it quickly. It was dry and leached all of the moisture out of his mouth, but once he’d swallowed it, he could go. It didn’t matter where. There were covered benches down on the promenade, like the one he’d dreamed about the night before. He could sit sheltered in one of those, watch it rain on the sea. How pointless was that, by the way—raining on the water? Why did it even bother? He was feeling miserable now, and everything seemed stupid. He just wanted to go.

  But when he glanced up, ready to start making his excuses, he saw the old lady was looking at him with a curious expression on her face—partly smiling but also serious, as if making an assessment.

  “How would you like to see something?” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “Just…something you might find interesting.”

  She went to a small drawer in the counter, took an object out, and held it up to show him. It was a large key.

  He frowned. “What’s that for?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said. “It’s all right—you can bring your tea.”

  Mark followed the old lady out into the corridor. He assumed she was going to go left, into the narrow passageway that led to the outer door, that perhaps there was something stored in a cupboard there. He had a horrible suspicion she was going to give him something. Old people did that sometimes, thinking they were being nice but in fact making you accept something that you didn’t understand or value and didn’t know what to do with.

  Instead, she turned right and walked to the big, solid door. She fitted the key into its lock and turned it with an apparent effort. It made a loud, hollow sound, like a single horse’s hoof landing on the road. She turned the knob and pushed, and the door opened away from her, slowly receding, without any sound at all.

  There was darkness on the other side, the faintest hint of a very pale, gray glow in one corner.

  “Ready?” she said.

  She reached into the gloom and flicked a switch on the wall, and suddenly a couple of dim lights came on beyond, hanging from the ceiling of whatever lay on the other side of the door.

  Mark’s mouth dropped open slowly.

  five

  He followed the old lady as she stepped through the threshold and into the corridor beyond. It was the same width as the one they’d entered from, and ran toward the back of the building. Where the first corridor had been merely grimy, however, the walls here were almost brown. Mark looked more closely and saw that the color was mottled, as if caused by years and years of smoke, under a thick layer of dust.

  There were two openings on the right of the corridor. The first was a narrow door, which was shut. The second, a couple of yards farther on, was the entrance to a short side corridor. There was a door on the left of this, and another opening at the end.

  Past this, the main corridor ran for a few more yards and then took a sharp right turn. He couldn’t see what happened after that, but it was from down there that the soft gray light was coming.

  “What is this?”

  “What do you think?”

  Mark shook his head. He couldn’t imagine what this space might have been. It looked a little like a floor of the house above, but with much lower ceilings and no windows and no fancy bits anywhere. It felt ancient, almost like a cave—but because of the smooth surfaces and corners everywhere, it also felt almost modern.

  “The servants’ quarters,” the old lady said.

  “Servants?”

  “These houses were built a long time ago. Not even the last century—the one before that. They were made specially for fancy people up in London, who wanted to come and take in the sea air.”

  “On holiday?”

  “Like a holiday, but it was supposed to be good for their health too. Fancy people weren’t used to doing anything for themselves in those days, though, and so they brought their servants along with them.”

  “What kind of servants?”

  The lady opened the first door. Beyond was a dark recess, about four feet deep and three feet wide, with shelves on either side. These were empty and thick with dust and cobwebs.

  “The butler’s pantry,” she said. “You’ve heard of butlers, I assume?”

  Mark’s understanding of the term was largely confined to the expression “the butler did it,” plus he’d heard of Jeeves, but he nodded. “The man who opened the door to people.”

  She smiled faintly. “That, and a good deal more. He was in charge of the world down here, for the most part, and one of his responsibilities was the house’s wine, and brandy, and port.” She closed the door again and pointed at a dark smudge just below the door handle, which extended a couple of inches either side of where the door met the frame. “This was sealed with wax every night, to make sure none of the other servants…helped themselves.”

  She led Mark down the corridor and into the right turn. The first door on the left was open. Beyond was a tiny, windowless room, barely big enough to hold a single bed. Now it was full of old, broken furniture and shadows. “This was where the butler slept.”

  “It’s tiny.”

 
“Not for a servant, I can assure you. Only one other person down here even had a room to themselves.”

  She walked on past the doorway to the end. The lights from the corridor didn’t shed much illumination here, and all Mark could make out was a murky and low-ceilinged space, again filled with bits of old junk.

  “The servants’ parlor. They ate their meals in here, and the housemaid would sleep on the floor at night.”

  “This is where they hung out?”

  “There was no ‘hanging out.’ They worked. I’ll show you where.”

  As she led Mark back to the main corridor, the old lady trailed her frail hand along the surface of the right-hand wall. Where it joined the other passage, it turned in a smooth arc.

  When they reached the point at the bottom where the corridor turned to the right again, Mark gasped quietly. He could see now where the light had been coming from.

  The space they walked into was almost like a small, enclosed courtyard, filled with muted gray light, as if from inside a rain cloud. It was protected from the sky by a wooden roof and a large skylight, but still felt nearly as much a part of the outside as a part of the house. This, he realized, was where the smell was coming from. A couple of panes of glass in the skylight were cracked or broken, and water was dripping steadily onto the floor, onto broken tiles and pieces of wood that lay strewn all around. They smelled rotten. There were pigeon feathers on the ground, too, and quite a lot of bird crap. There was a soft, cooing sound from somewhere.

  “Dreadful things,” the old lady said. “Rats with wings.”

  Mark barely heard her. He was turning in a slow circle. On the left side of the room there were a couple more doorways, one to an area with metal grilles in the walls. At the far end of the space was another pair, but much lower, and on the right side of the room, which he assumed must be a kitchen, he saw the rusted remains of…he wasn’t really sure what it was, in fact.

  “The range,” the old lady said. “Where meals for the entire household were cooked. There would have been a big table here, right where we’re standing, but I’m sure that was sold many years ago. Probably a dining table up in London now, or someone’s desk. People stopped living this way seventy or eighty years ago. In most houses all this has been turned into a basement apartment.”