The Servants (10 page)

“Hello,” the old lady said.

Mark held up the brown paper bag. “I was passing a place,”

he said, “and they had these. I wondered if you’d like one.”

She took the bag from him and looked inside.

“That’s very kind,” she said. “I’m a little tired today. Couldn’t face the walk. Very
lazy
of me, I know.”

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t h e s e r va n t s

Mark shrugged, smiled, took a step back from the door. He knew he mustn’t seem too eager to come in, that the rock cake should come across as a gift, and nothing more. “Cool,” he said. The old lady opened the door a little wider.

“Would you like to come and share it? I never can seem to finish one by myself. Though I think I might have already told you that.”

Mark’s plan was simple. He merely wanted to see if the old lady said anything that made it easier for him to work out where the dream had started the other night. Now he was actually here, however, he realized there was a problem in how to bring the subject up.

He tried mentioning that he’d spent yesterday practicing on his skateboard, hoping that she might say something like,

“Didn’t your leg hurt too much?” But she merely smiled, as if he’d said he whiled away the time trying to balance an otter on his head, and he realized it was possible she didn’t even know what skateboarding
was
.

They each ate half of the rock cake—and this time, knowing what to expect, Mark found he rather enjoyed it. When he had finished, realizing how clumsy it sounded, Mark said how nice it had been, even better than
cookies
. The old lady just nodded.

“The old cakes are the best,” she said.

“Though I do like custard creams,” Mark countered cunningly.

“Very nice,” she agreed—failing to make a reference to Brunswick Cream, or anything else that would help Mark

 

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h work out whether that part had actually happened. It was another brick wall. Mark supposed he could just come straight out and ask, saying, “Um, did you open your door the afternoon before last, to find I’d crash-landed outside?” If she said yes, though, that still left the heart of the problem unresolved.

So he tried something else. “I had a weird dream the other night.”

She was silent for a moment.

“Did you?” she asked eventually, turning to look at him. He’d never really noticed how sharp her eyes were. Most old people’s eyes seemed to go vague and watery, slack and pink around the lids—as if a lifetime of looking at things had completely worn them out. Hers were not like that. They were very clear, and gray, and looked as if they could see a long way. Something in the combination of their directness and the way she’d said “Did you?” made him wonder what exactly she was asking. Was she saying “Did you?” in a polite way, like “Oh yes?” or “Is that so?”—or was she asking something else? Was she actually asking whether what he was talking about
had,
in fact, only been a dream?

“Yes,” he said.

“I never dream,” she said, and looked away. That seemed to be the end of that. Mark resorted to going back to laboriously engineered mentions of skateboarding, but he could tell her attention was drifting. It was very warm in the tiny room, and the window wasn’t open even a little bit. The clock was ticking heavily in the background. The old lady had begun to look a little dozy, and Mark hadn’t

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t h e s e r va n t s

made any headway at all. He kept trying to find some way of broaching the subject but got stuck in a circuitous ramble about various features of the promenade, and when he finally looked up, he saw she was asleep.

“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 t h e s e r va n t s

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

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h 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

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t h e s e r va n t s

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.

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h

“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, drawnout 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.

“Up
stairs
?” 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 quietly, 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 disap  

t h e s e r va n t s

peared, 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

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h 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.