The Servants Read online

  But he remembered something about his previous visit now, too. When he’d woken in the old lady’s room, it had been twenty-five minutes past eight. Yet after being in the back area for at least ten minutes, then returning the key to the drawer, getting back up to his room, and getting a drink from the kitchen, it had only been eight thirty-five. He was sure of these times. It was one of the things he’d used to prove to himself that the experience could only have been a dream.

  Now it had happened again, and he knew what had just occurred could not be a dream. Dreams did not leave dust on your hands, or smudges on the shoulders of your jacket.

  Whatever he’d just seen, wherever he’d just been, it had been real.

  As he walked back along the waterline, oblivious to the wheeling sea birds and whisper of the waves, Mark knew there remained another unresolved problem. If his previous visit had been real too, then it implied everything about that visit had been real. It meant that he really had slipped off the sill of his window, broken his descent by grabbing the fence railing, and landed heavily in the basement courtyard. So why didn’t his leg hurt the next morning? Why didn’t it still hurt now?

  He’d taken a lot of tumbles over the last three—almost four—weeks. He was used to ignoring them. But that was just it: he had become accustomed to ignoring the aches and pains. With the knock he’d taken falling into the basement, there was nothing to ignore. How could that be? He remembered finding it hard to get up from his chair in the old lady’s room, limping hard when he got back to his bedroom, and waking in the morning fully braced for it to hurt like hell. But it had not.

  It was a small mystery, in the face of everything else, but it gnawed at him all the way back to the house.

  WHEN he closed the door behind him, he noticed something straight away. A faint smell, slightly sour. He sniffed, trying to work out what it was. It reminded him of the odor he’d encountered below-stairs. But he also knew, now he’d noticed it, that it had been present up here before.

  He went into his room and sat on the bed for a while. He didn’t feel like reading—not that he had anything new, of course—nor playing a video game. He just sat, much as he had on the beach, staring out of the window. Though what had happened earlier had been strange, and magical, it had left him with an uncertain feeling. It could have been that he was questioning his own mind—he’d heard of people going bonkers, starting to think they were seeing things that weren’t there. One of his own grandmothers had gone a little that way at the end, he’d been told—but that wasn’t it.

  It was more that although nothing bad had happened, the afternoon’s events had left him with a sense of heaviness. The image that kept returning to him was the change in the cook: the way she’d looked as she laughed, then later, as she stared at the range. The change in her face was as irrevocable as the difference between being able to go on the West Pier or not.

  At six o’clock, he left his room, intending to head upstairs. He’d remembered they were going out tonight, and that was something to look forward to. He hesitated in the corridor, however, and before going up, he turned and walked past the kitchen.

  He looked back toward the front of the house, judging the distance. When the girl in the gray dress had disappeared, she must have been about where he was now—though a floor below, of course.

  He peered carefully at the other end of the corridor. After a moment, he realized there was a return in the side, just before the door to the bathroom, which created a small alcove. It held a coatrack now, on which his mother’s coat had hung without being disturbed for quite some time. But maybe…

  He went and stood in the space. Yes, you could just about fit a small staircase here. The old lady had said the servants had their own, weren’t even allowed to use the main one. The man in the suit had also mentioned a back stairs.

  The girl in gray had disappeared somewhere about here.

  He looked up, trying to picture the landing on the floor above. He could not, so he went up the real stairs and had a look. There was indeed another little alcove here. This must have been where it went.

  Though it was not, of course, here now.

  So what had happened to the girl? Where had she gone, and how?

  Before he went through into his mother’s area, he noticed something else, on the wall to the right of the door. Though the surfaces had been painted white recently—part of the redecoration David had instigated before they’d moved down here—if you looked closely, you could see a horizontal band a couple of feet long and half an inch thick. As if there’d once been a shelf there, where trays would be left and picked up.

  Mark looked back at the alcove. Two flights of a tiny staircase. Pick up the tray, then vanish back down again to the world below. If you moved fast, and timed it right, no one would ever know you’d been there. For just a moment Mark wondered if that still happened, and it was just that no one happened to be watching at the right time.

  He shook his head. It was a silly idea.

  DAVID smiled briefly when Mark entered, but didn’t say anything.

  His mother was in the armchair, wearing a dressing gown over her nightdress. Mark knew right away that something was up. She took forever to get ready. She should have started by now.

  Mark felt the speed go out of his feet. He drifted over to the couch and perched on the end closest to her. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine,” she said, smiling brightly. “How was your day?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said. “Skateboarding and stuff.”

  “No more injuries?”

  “No,” he said. “So—where are we going tonight?”

  His mother looked at him for a moment, and then her gaze drifted away, to David.

  “We wondered about ordering food in again,” David said, with forced good cheer.

  Mark smiled, but only in his head. “I thought we were going out.”

  “Your mother’s a little tired,” David said briskly. “So—what do you say: Wo Fat?”

  “Okay,” Mark said. “If you insist.”

  MARK was in charge of ordering again, and got exactly the same as last time, plus some steamed dumplings. The three of them sat around the table at the front of the room. The television was off, as if it was a real dinner. The sound of forks in bowls was loud.

  “These spring rolls are good,” David said.

  Mark ignored him. David was just trying to turn this into his thing. It wasn’t going to work. And the funny thing was, the rolls didn’t seem quite so good tonight anyway. As Mark slowly munched his way through his second, he tried to work out why that was. Everything was hot, everything tasted the way it always did, but…Part of it was that his mind was elsewhere—working away at what had happened that afternoon, like a tongue jogging a tooth that was loose. But that wasn’t all of it. As he played with his special fried rice, he realized a lot of what was special about takeout food was that it was special. It was great simply because it was great, of course, but also because you didn’t have it every day. Even though tonight’s choice of dinner meant he’d won, sort of, it didn’t feel that way. Chinese once a week was fantastic. Every other night…wasn’t the same.

  Even that wasn’t really it, however. Mark’s mother had said at lunchtime that she wanted to go out tonight. And yet when he’d arrived, she hadn’t been dressed to go out. So she hadn’t even got that far before deciding it wasn’t going to happen.

  Mark wondered if it had ever been truly under consideration.

  He wondered, without fully articulating the thought, whether his mother had started to substitute talking about things for actually doing them. He remembered that when she’d mentioned the idea of going into town the other day, there had been nothing specific in her plans. She hadn’t said, “Oh, I really want to go to The Witch Ball”—a tiny, higgledy, two-story shop in the Lanes that sold old maps and prints and postcards and things, and from which during previous visits Mark’s father virtually had to pull her out by her feet. She hadn’t m
entioned Brighton Books either, though their house in London had once carried whole shelves of prizes she’d found in there (now in boxes, unopened, on the top floor of David’s house). No mention of specific clothes stores, shoe stores, or anything else. She’d just talked about going out in general. As if the talking was supposed to stand in for the doing.

  As if she’d never really meant to go out.

  Mark didn’t feel let down by this, wasn’t concerned about the possibility that she’d misled him as to her intentions. What worried him was the idea that she perhaps hadn’t really known this herself.

  “Weather’s supposed to be fine again tomorrow,” David said boringly.

  “Super,” Mark muttered.

  “If they’re right, how about we get out of this house?” he said. “It’s about time.”

  Mark looked up. It was almost as if David had been able to hear what he was thinking. His stepfather was apparently concentrating on tipping soy sauce over his rice. “Have a poke around the stores,” he added. “You feel up to that?”

  Mark turned to look at his mother, who was taking a long time to get through a small bowl of chow mein.

  “That would be lovely,” she said. “Yes. Let’s do it. The walls need…some more pictures. The staircase, too. Don’t you think?”

  Mark did. But he’d also thought it when she’d said it before.

  They ate in silence for another ten minutes. Mark was just about to put aside his fork, having eaten only half of what he’d normally reckon on putting away, when his mother suddenly made an odd noise.

  Her face had turned an odd color. White, but not just white. Almost like curdled milk, or cream.

  David was on his feet before Mark had any idea what was about to happen. He hooked an arm around Mark’s mother’s back and had her on her feet quickly, hurrying her through the sitting room and into the bedroom, toward the small bathroom there.

  He just about got her there in time, but didn’t have a chance to shut either of the doors between them and the boy, who sat at the table, surrounded by cooling food, his fork still in his hand.

  Mark heard the sound of vomiting.

  It went on for a long time.

  fourteen

  He did not sleep well, and when he woke the next morning he knew he had spent much of the night in dreams, though he couldn’t remember anything about them, apart from one:

  He had been down on the seafront, in exactly the same position as he’d been in the dream he’d had a few nights ago, after playing football with his dad. It was daytime, though, or late afternoon. The beach was deserted, unnaturally so. Even in the coldest and wettest weather there was always someone down on the front, walking a dog or staring at the sea, huddled into a thick coat. But in Mark’s dream there had been absolutely no one, anywhere. Except…

  …he could see the back of someone standing in the water, about ten feet from the shore.

  Mark left the bench and walked down the steps to the beach. As he walked across them, he realized the sound the pebbles made was different from normal. It was not the usual scrunching noise, but a flapping, as of wings, a sound that seemed perpetually on the verge of turning into something else. When he got down to the waterline, he realized that the figure in the sea was wearing a dressing gown. The water came halfway up their thighs.

  “Hello?” he called. “Are you okay?”

  But the person, who had brown hair that was thick and long, did not turn around. Mark continued going forward until the water was lapping over his feet, so cold that his legs started to feel rigid. He called out again, but there was still no response. So he kept walking, pushing against the water, coming around one side of the figure, which just stood there motionless. He called out a final time, and then took another slow step, which brought him around to the front. He did not want to know who this person was, but he also understood that he had to find out. He looked up toward its face.

  The figure was now facing the other way, back up the beach.

  Mark quickly took a few steps back toward the shore, but when he looked again, all he saw was the figure’s back, as it now faced out to the sea once more. As he lurched away from it, he realized that the figure had disappeared, and that the West Pier was now standing again, gray and slightly tilted, as it had been in its last years, but whole.

  A lone figure stood right at the very end.

  As Mark watched, she slowly tilted forward.

  AS soon as he was dressed, he knew what he had to do. First he went upstairs. His mother was in bed, sleeping. David let Mark stand there for a moment watching her, and then drew him back into the sitting room, closing the bedroom door quietly.

  “I don’t think we’ll be going out today,” he said. “A doctor’s coming later.”

  “Coming here? Shouldn’t she go to the hospital?”

  “Maybe. We’ll see. What are you…?”

  By then Mark had already left the room. He picked up his skateboard on the way through and headed straight down to the front. The weathermen had been wrong, as usual. Clouds were already creeping closer over the sea, as if they’d been massing in the night, the other side of the horizon, gathering in thick, wet clumps, planning an assault on the land.

  Mark went to the skateboarding area and rocketed up and down for a while. Over the next few hours, a few other kids arrived and started doing tricks. Mark watched them without a great deal of interest. The idea of being able to flip the board, of double-ending or pulling one-eighties or anything else, had ceased to be exciting. He found that the only thing he really wanted to do was to keep pushing himself up and down, and up and down.

  Really, he was only doing it to kill time.

  He dutifully went home at lunch and bolted a handful of random raw materials from the fridge. David had evidently been shopping again. There were a whopping two cans of Diet Coke. Every time he went now, he came back with fewer. It was as if he was making a point. Mark got the point, but he wasn’t going to let his stepfather win.

  The first thing he did when he got back down to the seafront was stop at one of the cafés and buy three cans of Diet Coke. Though it was too cold for soft drinks and he quickly started to feel both bilious and frozen, he sat at one of the tables and drank the cans, one by one.

  AT three, he went to The Meeting Place. It had started to drizzle by then, but there was still a line. When he finally got to the front, he ordered what he needed, and then hurried up toward the road with his brown paper bag.

  When he got to the house, the clouds above had thickened still further, and the rain was getting serious. It was dark enough for him to see a soft glow from behind the thick lace curtains in the window of the basement apartment. He nearly slipped on the narrow metal staircase, and as he knocked on the door he knew his sudden appearance was going to look odd.

  But he had no choice. He had to go in there again.

  The door opened after about two minutes. The old lady looked at him, then at the bag he held in his hand.

  “My,” she said. “We have become fond of these, haven’t we?”

  The room was as warm as ever, which was good. The clock’s tick remained heavy and metronomic. The tea was thick and brown, and the rock cake the best yet. Everything was as it should be.

  Apart from one thing. The old lady evidently wasn’t so tired today. Mark hit upon the idea of asking her questions about Brighton, about the way it used to be, and that kept them going for quite a while. The town had apparently been “racy” once, a term he didn’t understand but which seemed to involve dancing, men and women who weren’t really married to each other, or sometimes both. He learned that the town had originally been little more than a fishing village until some old king or prince took a fancy to it, and all the fashionable people from London came down. He was further informed that the place on the seafront with the few small boats drawn up on the pebbles—near to the hotel where Mark had not been served a few days before—had once been where fishermen pulled in their nets to unload the catch of the
day. This was all mildly interesting, but it wasn’t helping. As she talked, the old lady’s eyes remained bright and clear, and Mark grew more and more tense. As she refilled the teapot for the second time, he decided to try something else.

  He started talking about skateboarding.

  He could immediately tell that—as he’d suspected on the previous occasion—she had only a very hazy idea of what he meant. It soon became clear that while she had noticed young people swishing up and down with wheels under their feet, she had accepted the phenomenon without much interest or understanding, as one might be dimly aware that on some mornings you would find clumps of seaweed on the beach, while on others you would not, without feeling duty-bound to care much about the matter.

  Aha, Mark thought.

  He went back to the basics. His father had bought him several books on the subject, and also videos. Mark was very well-informed. He told her about early prototype skateboards. He told her about the street in Santa Monica, California, where you could skate down the sidewalk and feel almost as if you were surfing, the early birthplace of the sport.

  He told her…a lot of things.

  Before long, though she seemed content enough to listen, he thought her eyes weren’t looking quite so bright. He plowed on, running out of specifics, and finally found himself talking about something he’d never really considered before. He realized that the skateboard, by itself, was perfectly balanced. If you just put it down on the ground and left it alone, everything was fine. It was only when you stood on it, and tried to do something, that things got complicated.