The Servants Read online

  “Nuts,” he said under his breath.

  Her mouth had fallen open a little, and she did not look very dignified. He started to get up, knowing it would be polite to let the old lady have her rest without an audience.

  And only then realized she might have given him another way of answering his question.

  HE sat back down and waited five minutes, listening to the noise of her breathing. It became slower, more regular, until it sounded like the sea, swishing in and out against the pebbles on the beach. She harrumphed at one point, shifted position slightly, and shut her mouth.

  After that she seemed to be even more deeply asleep.

  I heard a noise, Mark decided, as he watched her. I thought I heard something the other side of the wall. I was worried it might be burglars or vandals or something. I borrowed the key just to go and check. I hope that was all right…

  He got up quietly, experiencing a strange and sudden feeling of déjà vu, expecting his leg to hurt. The sensation was so strong that he couldn’t actually tell whether it did or not.

  He got the key from the drawer, and tiptoed to the door. Stopped to watch her for another minute, but she was fast asleep.

  Then he crept out into the hallway, and unlocked the door.

  twelve

  It was less dark this time. The weather outside was better than on his first (and only?) previous visit, and so more light was filtering down into the kitchen at the back. There was enough of a general gray glow that when Mark closed the big door behind him and turned to look along the corridor, it felt just as if he was standing in an abandoned floor no one knew about. Nothing more.

  The door to the butler’s pantry was closed again, though, which made him pause for a second—until he realized that if it had been a dream the other night, that only meant it was still closed from when the old lady had first shown it to him. Both times when he’d definitely been awake, it had been shut. The time in between…it had not been.

  Maybe that was all the proof he needed, right there.

  He reached out to the light switch and flicked it on. A dim light came on farther down the corridor. That had to be a second piece of proof. He’d dreamed it didn’t work. Yet it obviously did.

  He took a couple of quiet steps farther, and turned into the side passage. The butler’s room was just as he remembered it from when the old lady had showed him, just a jumble of broken furniture that came right to the door. The little room at the end looked the same, too, the one in which he’d (dreamed he’d) glimpsed a candle’s light, far away in the darkness. It was dead, cluttered, and smelled of mildew. It was hard to believe that anyone could ever have spent any time in there.

  He followed the main corridor toward the kitchen. There was no pigeon in residence this time, and it was empty and quiet—though there was still a low, rank smell, maybe even worse than before.

  Something caught his eye as he entered, and he squatted down to see a glint of something half-hidden beneath a small pile of rotten wood in the corner. It was a teaspoon. Very small, tarnished, and slightly bent.

  A definite souvenir, though—and he kept it in his hand as he straightened up.

  He poked around the room for ten minutes, feeling both relieved and disappointed. The dust in here was very real, and made him remember something else he’d noticed in the dream the other night. It hadn’t been dusty. Smoky, and thick with smells, and with some kind of unclean film everywhere. But no dust. He should have realized that before. He also noticed that if he stood in exactly the right position, slightly to one side of the skylight, there was a fragment of one of the panes, which was clean enough—having somehow avoided being broken, or crapped on by a bird, or covered in decades of grime—through which he could glimpse a section of the frosted window of the toilet on the first floor of David’s house. Being able to see that, connecting visually from here to a recognizable element of the outside world, made all the dream-stuff harder to believe.

  He looked around for a little longer, however. It was still pretty cool. When you stood in the tiny room where the meat used to be stored, you could almost believe you could still smell it, though you knew it was just pigeon poo with a sour metallic tang from the rust, which covered most of the surfaces. He went back out into the center of the kitchen, turning the spoon over and over in his hands, watching it catch the light from above, trying to imagine a time when it had been one of many pieces of silverware in constant movement in this room.

  Finally, he held the spoon still, looking into its scarred inner surface, thinking it was probably time to go.

  “What are you doing with that?”

  Suddenly the spoon was gone from his hand, and Mark looked up to see a man standing in front of him.

  The man, in fact—the one in the tight black suit. He was glaring at the spoon he now held as if its existence signaled a grave and possible terminal overthrow of all of God’s laws concerning what was acceptable in the world.

  Mark stared at him.

  “And who might you be, more to the point?” the man demanded, swiveling his head to peer intently down at Mark, like an eagle that knew it had pinioned its prey. The man was tall and angular, with a high forehead and steel-gray hair that looked as if it had been cut and styled using scissors and a ruler. “And what on earth are you wearing?”

  Mark was quite unable to say anything. He was too busy noticing that the quality of the air had started to change—that the light from above had become muted, as if the rays of the sun he’d walked under that morning were no longer able to penetrate, as if something thicker and more viscous had taken their place.

  The man in the suit pivoted smartly about, held the spoon up high, and waved it imperiously.

  “Martha,” he said. “One of yours, I assume?”

  A gloriously fat woman suddenly appeared from Mark’s right. Her hair was gray and bundled up chaotically on top of her head. She seemed to start talking in mid-sentence, or as if her speech had emerged out of the low but growing hubbub of generalized sound—a noise, something like flapping, that Mark recognized.

  “…and make sure them trays are proper clean this time. They keep getting mucky no matter what I do.”

  She pronounced “time” more like “toyme,” and some of the other words sounded a little odd to Mark’s ears. Her face was bright red and she was sweating like a pig. She grabbed the spoon from the man, spat in it, and rubbed it hard on an apron that at one point might very well have been white.

  “’Course it be,” she said. “Question is what you’re doing with it, Mr. Maynard. Know you don’t like to get your hands dirty.”

  And then she laughed, very loudly, and for a long time.

  “This young gentleman had it in his possession,” the man said, when she’d finally stopped. “Do you have any notion what he might be doing here?”

  The woman—Martha—grinned, showing a set of teeth in which there were significant gaps. “Came with the last side of beef,” she said. “I’m thinking he might make a nice pie. What do you think?”

  Mark blinked, having no idea how seriously to take this. He felt hot now, very hot—presumably because of the heat pumping out of the range. Just then it made a sudden, drawn-out sound, like a deep and rumbling cough.

  Both Martha and the man turned to look dubiously at the cooker.

  “It’s doing it again,” Martha said, and a good deal of the cheer in her voice had disappeared.

  A bell started ringing then, insistently, and Mark noticed a row of them had appeared on the side wall of the kitchen. He was also aware of someone entering the room behind him, and turned sluggishly to see a stumpy young girl rushing in, dressed in a gray uniform.

  “I’m from upstairs,” he said, to whoever would listen.

  “Upstairs?” the man in the suit said immediately, as if Mark had said he was from Mars. “Then how did you get down here?”

  “Must be a friend of Master Tom’s,” the girl in the gray dress muttered as she hurried past. She spoke quietl
y, as if it was a risk. Her face was pale and a little blotchy. “The family has visitors from up London today, don’t they?”

  When she got to the back corner of the kitchen, she disappeared, just vanished clean away. Mark could hear the sound of footsteps on wood, hurrying, sounding as if they were going upward.

  “That’s as may be,” the suited man said. “That’s as very well may…be. But nonetheless I repeat, in the hope this time of an answer: how did he get down here?”

  He turned to Mark with something between irritation and deference, and bent toward him again. “Young sir, what is your name?”

  “Mark,” Mark said.

  “Mark,” the man repeated. “Mark. I see, I see. And how did you come to be down here, Master Mark, if I might be permitted to enquire?”

  Mark pointed back at the corridor that led toward the front of the house. “I, er—that way,” he said.

  “Aha,” the man crowed, smiling in a thin, triumphant fashion. “Not the back stairs?”

  “No.”

  “But from the front.”

  “Yes.”

  The man nodded briskly, now looking like a chicken that had finally been proved correct over a point that had long been in bitter dispute. “Would you mind coming with me?” he said.

  Mark found himself following the man—Mr. Maynard—out of the kitchen and into the hallway. The scant light was once more coming from flickering sources on the walls. The dim bulbs that had been hanging from the ceiling had disappeared. It had become smoky, too, very smoky—particles hanging in the air, swiveling in slow motion, like a kind of dark and weightless rain. There was a thick smell everywhere, like rancid fat. The noise coming from the range cooker had got worse too, and the last glimpse he got of Martha was of her standing unhappily in front of it, hands on her hips.

  They were only halfway along the passage when someone else appeared—the short woman Mark had also seen the other night. She had come in through the door at the end, the main door.

  Even though this door was still closed.

  “Mrs. Wallis,” the man in the suit said, in an airy tone. “I wonder if I might borrow a moment of your so-valuable time.”

  “If you make it quick,” the woman said. “And try not to be infuriating.”

  “This young gentleman was in the kitchen.”

  “Well, well.” The woman looked down at Mark. “Good afternoon, young sir. And where did you come from?”

  “Upstairs,” Mark said, again. It was about the only thing he was sure of, and he’d decided he would just keep saying it.

  “He entered the quarters from the front, Mrs. Wallis. From your area of influence, to be plain.”

  “Did he, now?”

  “He did. Do we find this is acceptable? Do we run an open house?”

  “Didn’t see him.” The woman shrugged. “And now, if that’s all, Mr. Maynard…”

  “No, it is not all,” the man said, and Mark realized he was becoming very angry. “We have spoken about this before. If someone like the young gentleman can make his way in here, then any vagabond or thief might do the same. Is that a state of affairs we wish to encourage?”

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Wallis said. “But I didn’t see him. I told you.”

  The two then started to argue, along what sounded like familiar lines. Mark was distracted, however. First by noticing that the smoke, when it finally made it to the ground, was settling in wet-looking clumps. Then by the sound of footsteps.

  He turned to see someone hurrying out from the side passageway, perhaps summoned by the sound of a new bell, which had started ringing in the kitchen, a bell with a low and ominous tone.

  It was the girl he had seen when he’d been here before. The one with red hair. Once again she glanced at him in passing—and this time she stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” she said hesitantly.

  Both Mr. Maynard and Mrs. Wallis turned to look at her.

  “Emily—do you know this young gentleman?”

  “No sir, Mr. Maynard,” the girl said.

  Mark knew she wasn’t quite telling the truth. He knew she recognized him—that she, alone of all of them, had somehow glimpsed him when he’d been here the other night.

  “Well, hurry on then,” Mrs. Wallis snapped. “I hear bells—don’t you? Run along.”

  The bells were indeed still ringing, but that wasn’t the only thing that Mark could hear. There was another sound, too. It was like…

  It was the sound of a police siren.

  Far away, but getting closer—as if a patrol car was zipping along the seafront road. Mark realized that he couldn’t hear Mr. Maynard and Mrs. Wallis as clearly anymore, though they were still talking heatedly to each other, their dispute escalating. The air seemed to be getting in the way, deflecting the sound of their voices and sending it past him in a way he couldn’t catch.

  It didn’t feel as warm in the corridor now, either, and the glow that had been warming the walls since the man in the suit had snatched the spoon from Mark—walls that, he saw, were stained from where the smoke had clumped on them, to slide down toward the ground, leaving dark smears behind—was fading, as everything became more dark once again.

  Oh no, he thought, his stomach dropping. The siren…

  He knew he had to get out of there—now—before the siren disturbed the old lady. He’d left the drawer in her room open, to make it easier to drop the key back in when he returned. She’d see that as soon as she woke, and know immediately what he’d done.

  “Excuse me,” he said urgently. “Excuse me? I’ve got to go.”

  Neither of them seemed able to hear him anymore. The woman was making a point by poking the man in the chest with her finger. He was not taking this well. Mark said “Excuse me” once again, even louder—still with no response. He couldn’t get past them: they were blocking the whole of the corridor.

  The siren got louder still, as it passed the bottom of the square—and Mark decided he couldn’t wait any longer.

  He stepped forward, prepared to squeeze between Mr. Maynard and Mrs. Wallis, just push his way past, if necessary. But as he drew level with them, the temperature in the corridor suddenly dropped, and then…

  …they just weren’t there.

  The momentum he’d built up was enough to send him straight through the space where the man in the suit had been, to collide with the wall. He turned, bewildered, and looked back down the corridor. He was alone now. The light had returned to a soft gray. The smoke was gone.

  He grabbed the handle of the main door, suddenly convinced it wouldn’t open, that the rules of the world would have changed and he would be stuck in the corridor forever…but it turned smoothly and he stepped quickly out the other side. He locked the door and hurried straight into the old lady’s room, as the sound of siren started to fade.

  She was shifting position, making a soft, wet sound with her lips. Mark dodged straight over to the drawer and dropped the key inside—slipping it shut afterward and then darting over to land as quietly as possible in his chair.

  He made it, heart thumping, just as her eyelids started to slowly rise.

  “Dear me,” she said. “I was just…resting my eyes.”

  “That’s okay,” Mark said, keeping his voice level with an effort. “You said you were tired.”

  She levered herself upright. “Did I miss anything?”

  “Oh no,” Mark said. “Nothing at all.”

  thirteen

  Mark drank another cup of tea with her—strangely, the pot was still warm, though he knew he must have been in the servants’ quarters for at least twenty minutes, maybe longer—and then left.

  He went straight down to the promenade, walked down one of the short flights of stone steps and onto the pebbles and continued for a few yards before abruptly sitting down, his back to the wall.

  After a few minutes, he slowly raised his hands to look at them. Then turned to look at the left shoulder of his jacket.

 
Though the man in the suit had taken the spoon from Mark, he had come out with a souvenir after all. Both his hands and his jacket had smudges on them, remnants of the dust and smoke he’d seen in the basement.

  It was impossible to deny that he’d been in there.

  HE sat until his behind hurt, and then got up and walked. He headed over the humps and dips of the pebble drifts to within a couple of feet of the waterline. The tide was out, and when he’d walked a few hundred yards he was very close to the rusted supports of the West Pier. He stood with his hands pushed into his pockets and looked out at the twisted spider of lopsided metal, looming over the water. The last time they’d been to Brighton with Mark’s real father, a lone wooden hut, perhaps a ticket booth, had still been clinging to life, a final remnant of the way things had once been. Since then it had disappeared, the victim of some storm, fallen apart and into the water. When you walked along the line of the Brunswick houses, if you glanced down into the little basement courtyards you sometimes saw pieces of wood or metal down there, pieces of the old pier—often quite large—which had been washed up onto the shore and which people had picked up and brought home. Souvenirs, perhaps, as if people were trying to keep the memory of it alive.

  Mark was in a daze. He was going over and over what had just happened, trying to make sense of it. Somehow, after he’d stepped through that door, something had happened. What that actually was he didn’t yet understand—but he no longer believed that the other night had been a dream. Not all of it, anyhow. It was clear from the way the girl—Emily—had looked at him that she recognized him, as he had recognized her. Somehow, unlike the other people he’d encountered, she’d seen him the first time he’d been there (or the second, if you counted the time the old lady had shown him around). There was something else in common between the last two visits, too. The more Mark pondered it, the more he realized it simply made no sense that the tea in the old lady’s pot could still have been warm. It had been sitting there for at least ten minutes after she’d last topped it up, before she even fell asleep. Okay, the room was warm—but if you added the time he’d been in the…other place, it just had to have gone cold.