The Servants (18 page)

When they were near where the back stairs must once have been, David stopped.

“I’d like you to do something for me,” he said. Mark opened his mouth to tell the man everything he’d ever thought of him, but then didn’t.

Instead, he said: “What?”

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twenty

He had nearly two hours to kill, and so he walked. He didn’t go in the direction of the big hotel this time, but the other way. There was nothing much to see down there, but that was okay.

At the little café at that end he bought what he’d been told to buy, then slowly walked back. He had no idea what he was doing, or why, but for once was happy not to have to make any decisions for himself. He headed along the seafront. It was cold, and though the sky was clear, there weren’t too many other people on the promenade.

When he got level with the covered bench, he went to the railing and down the steps to the pebbles, as he’d been told. He headed in a straight line from here toward the sea. The pebbles were level for a while but then started to descend toward the waterline, about forty feet away. As Mark walked over the crest of the drift of rocks, he saw something about halfway between there and the sea. He trudged closer, more slowly now, trying to work out what it was. It looked so out of place on the beach that he was m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h almost upon it before it became clear. It was a blanket, one of the red-and-black-and-green ones that went in the back of a car.

It was spread out flat, anchored in each corner by a stone. There was a basket at one end, with a lid. There was a dinner plate placed in the middle of the other three sides. In the center of the blanket there was a glass jar, holding a candle. It had been lit, and a warm flame flickered inside. Mark turned and walked hurriedly back up the beach. He was almost at the steps when he saw something in the square. At first he couldn’t tell what it was, so he just stood and watched as it came down the sidewalk very slowly. It was David, and he was carrying Mark’s mother. She was dressed in day clothes, and had a blanket wrapped around her. David had one arm under her legs and the other around her back. Hers were linked around his neck. They waited at the pedestrian crossing for the sign to walk, and then David carried her across the road. A couple of people going the other way stared at them, but neither David nor Mark’s mother paid them any attention.

When he got to the promenade, David headed straight for the stone steps, moving steadily. He carried the woman in his arms with the air of a man who could do so for a long time, who would do so forever, if necessary.

Mark watched as they got closer, and then stood back to give David room as he negotiated his way down the stairs. Mark’s mother smiled at him. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” he said.

And then he walked with them to where the blanket lay.

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t h e s e r va n t s

David put Mark’s mother gently down. She coughed for a little while, but then was okay.

“What a
beautiful
afternoon,” she said. It was. It was a little after three o’clock, and the far corners of the sky were already beginning to turn, to darken, as the early sunset gathered itself, still well over the horizon now, but coming closer. The air was cool but soft, and his mother did not look cold.

David opened the basket. Inside was silverware, and three napkins.

“Did you get it?” he asked.

Mark pulled what he’d bought out of his jacket pockets. Two cans of Diet Coke. He put them down next to one of the plates.

“Good,” David said. He pulled a bottle of wine out of the basket, and a corkscrew, and opened it. Two glasses followed—proper glass, not plastic—and he poured some of the wine into both of them.

“How lovely,” Mark’s mother said. “Cheers.”

They clinked their glasses together, and then she turned to Mark, still holding hers up. He tapped the rim of his Coke can against it, not really trusting himself to speak. The three of them sat then for a while, watching the waves, listening to the squawk and caw of seagulls wheeling overhead. On the horizon was the silhouette of a big ship, bound for who knows where, but so far away it seemed motionless.

They must have been like that for fifteen, twenty minutes, when Mark heard a sound behind him. He turned to

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h see a figure trudging along the pebbles toward them from quite some distance away.

As the figure got closer, it became possible first to see that he was dressed all in black, then that he was carrying something in each hand. Finally, by the time he was about fifty feet away and still trudging determinedly in their direction, that he was Chinese.

Eventually, he made it to their blanket.

“Your order,” he said. “Thirty-two pound fifty, please.”

Mark’s mother sat, still looking out to sea, as David and Mark unpacked the bags the waiter had brought.

“I didn’t even know they were open this early,” Mark said.

“They’re not” was all David would say.

It took a while to lay everything out and choose what to put on their plates, and then they began to talk together. Mark’s mother talked about what the West Pier had been like when she visited it, going along the tilted walkway and into the first section, where fine ladies and gentlemen used to walk up and down many years before, taking the air, the women carrying parasols and the men wearing hats. Then along a promenading area and into the ballroom at the end, where they once had concerts with whole orchestras, and all the best people from town came down to listen and to see and be seen. When she’d been there, it had been empty, with nothing but piles of rotting furniture in it, and the sound of starlings nesting up in the rafters, hundreds of them, maybe thousands—the birds that you could still see at sunset, even though the pier was all but gone now and provided no shelter,

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t h e s e r va n t s

wheeling in the air over it as if in remembrance of what had once been.

Mark talked about his skateboarding, and announced that today he’d managed to flip it under his feet without looking like an outtake from
Jackass,
and suddenly felt fiercely proud and glad of all the time he had spent on it. And even David talked a little, saying how he had once come down here as a kid, with his family, and the thing he remembered most was the twisted Lanes and the even narrower alleyways between them, the ones called “twittens,” which you almost had to have been born in to understand where they went. Mark ate, and for the first time in several days he found he could eat a lot. He ate spring rolls, and sesame toast, and a lot of fried rice and sweet-and-sour pork. David ate too, more than Mark had seen before. Mark’s mother put quite a lot on her own plate, and picked at it in between turning again and again to look out to sea.

A couple of times while she was doing this, and when he thought Mark wasn’t looking, David slipped his fork onto her plate and transferred some of her food onto his. But Mark did see, and he understood what David was doing, and the next time David did this, he was careful to be looking away.

When they all finally stopped eating, all of the plates were empty.

Everyone had eaten this meal.

The sky slowly got darker, and a golden glow began to spread across the horizon as the sun sank into the blanket of cloud.

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h Mark sat with his arms hooked around his knees. His behind hurt, despite the blanket, but he did not care. His mother leaned into David, her wineglass in her hand. When the sun was close to going under, she turned her face to him. “I’d like to go down there,” she said. David helped her up. She was unsteady on her feet for a moment, but then looked okay.

“You go,” he said. “It’s not far.”

And she looked at him with such gratefulness, because he had understood what she meant, that Mark had to look away again. He and David watched as she slowly, slowly made her way down the gentle slope, until she was on level ground about ten feet away from the water. She did not go any farther, but remained there, looking out.

Mark turned to David. His stepfather was watching his mother. More than ever before, but in a different way. Mark had no idea what to say to him. So for a while he said nothing, but watched with him as his mother stood with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and the sun shot gold and pink and lilac up through the gathering clouds.

“What was she like?” he asked, in the end.

“When?”

“When she was younger.”

“The same as she is now.”

“But—”

“Time means nothing,” David said.

She remained that way until the sun had gone, leaving behind a ghost, a lingering warmth in the clouds and the air.

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t h e s e r va n t s

Within five minutes of it slipping below the horizon, the air started to get markedly colder. She kept standing there, like a statue in the last of the fading light.

But then she started coughing. She didn’t stop. Then she was bent over, and began to fall.

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twenty-one

They got her home as quickly as they could. Then Mark went back to the beach for the basket and the blanket, running down the square and across the road as if his speed was the thing that could make a difference, as if it all came down to that. He loaded the plates and glasses into the basket as fast as he could without breaking anything, and then tried to set off up the pebbled slope at the same pace—but his feet kept slipping, the rocks resistant to anything except being dealt with in their own way. Only when he’d tipped forward onto his knees twice, crying out with desperate frustration, did he finally slow and trudge up them in a measured fashion, holding off the running until he was back on the promenade. His mother was still coughing when he got back to the house, a wretched, loose hacking that reverberated through the whole building as if broken glass was being poured down between the walls. Mark ran upstairs and into her sitting room, but she was not there.

He looked through into her bedroom and saw David, bent over, holding his mother’s head in the bathroom. t h e s e r va n t s

He backed away. He did not know what to do in that room. He knew there was only space for one person to support her head, and the job was taken by someone who could do it better than him.

As he left the room, David glanced around and saw him there. Mark could not read anything in his face. He went back downstairs to his bedroom and paced around it, his hands balled into fists, not knowing what to do. Not knowing what to do. Not knowing what to do. Knowing that he must do something.

But not knowing what to do.

An hour later, a car arrived outside the house, and Mark watched through the window as a man got out and hurried up the steps to the door. He heard the doorbell ring and David’s feet coming down the stairs. A hushed conversation, before the two men went up to his mother’s floor. Mark knew who this man was.

He was the doctor.

He had been here once before, weeks ago. On that occasion, he had arrived with a loud voice and a professional smile and sat and talked with Mark’s mother and David. He had left the house like someone who felt his best efforts had been rebuffed, and that evening Mark’s mother had been in a fierce good temper.

But now he could only be here because things were so much worse that the rules had altered and fierceness was not enough anymore. Mark suddenly understood what this battle had been about—that it had not been David being difficult,

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h or his mother obstinate. The big black car in which the doctor had arrived did not look like a vehicle that dispensed health, that came to rescue anyone. It looked like a hearse. It waited outside like something come to take you to Mordor, or somewhere farther and far worse. Mark had a sudden vision of his mother being hurried down the stairs on a black stretcher, waving to him as she was hustled by, calling his name: the stretcher then folded in half outside, with her still in it, as some helper opened the back door of the doctor’s car to let the shadows within come out to welcome and caress her as she was bundled inside. He saw the car purring slowly down the road into the darkness, the windows thick enough to muffle the screams.

It would not be like that, but that was the way it could be. He heard three voices upstairs in a long conversation, broken only by more coughing and the other, even more horrible sound. Then silence, before a single set of footsteps came briskly down the stairs.

When the doctor emerged from the house, he was on his cell phone. He was talking to his confederates, Mark knew. Though he was getting in his car without his quarry for the moment, everything in the set of his shoulders said his time had come. That he had won.

Everything Mark should have felt and realized before came shearing into his head at once. He understood his mother had been ill for longer than he’d known, that his father had left a sick woman to go live in another part of London with a woman who was not his wife, and who was not sick. He understood that over the years his mother had perhaps ex  

t h e s e r va n t s

changed letters with someone who had once been her friend, who had left to embark on a job that had gone on far too long, and had spent all that time regretting it. He understood that her decisions and way of being over the last weeks and months had nothing to do with thwarting him, or pleasing her new husband, but were bedded in a way of seeing a world that had been stripped bare of all of its blurring comforts and made very, very clear—a seared vision that poured a strange, black light into all its corners and showed you, at last, how much of a balancing act it all was, and had always been—how you rolled forward through time, faster and faster, until you came to the precipice that you knew was ahead somewhere but never saw until it was too late: and he understood that when you were in his mother’s position, a hospital was not somewhere full of stained-glass light, but an edifice of shadows in whose long, dark corridors you would walk until you became lost from sight.