The Servants

THE SERVANTS

M. M. Smith

For M.R.S.

And in memory of the W.P.

Prologue

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part Two

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part Three

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

If you live long enough, everything happens.

As she walked up the last stretch of pavement towards the house, the old lady felt cold. Not so much on the surface – her thick coat, scarf and hat were holding their own against the chill, aided by the exertion of a battle along the wintry seafront – but inside. The older you get, the colder your bones become, as if turning slowly back to stone – readying themselves for the unexpected day or inevitable night when you'll try to move your limbs and discover they are now forever still, that there's nothing to do but wait for someone to gently close your eyes. The body accepts ageing with resignation, never having expected to last forever. The mind has different ideas, and no respect for time.

Sadly, the body almost always wins.

She paused at the top of the stairs down to her flat, and looked back towards the sea, remembering years when she had run down the pebbled shore to dive into the waves. She had not always been old, of course. Nor always a lady, either, if the truth be told. Age is an excellent camouflage, turning those who wear it into spies, sleepers deep in enemy territory. No one imagines that the person wrapped inside that pale, dry tissue paper might have sweated and yelled and run, in their day, that they might know secrets yet to be discovered in younger lives. Least of all the young themselves, who – for all their gangly verve and the raptor-like acquisitiveness of their gaze – seem to find it impossible to see much beyond the tips of their noses. Not all of them, of course, and not always. But mainly.

Eventually the old lady turned away from the sea, and started down the steps.

She let herself into her little basement home, a place where she had lived so long that it was hard sometimes to remember that it was physically separate from her. She never forgot how fortunate she was to have it, though, having seen her contemporaries (those still alive, at least) exchanging a lifetime of independence and accumulated possessions for some bare cell in an old persons' facility, surrounded by crabby strangers: stripped of everything but memories that in time came to seem more real than the world had ever been; condemned to tea that was never made quite how they liked it, enduring the consensus choice of which television channel to have on.

Yes, her flat was tiny. But it was hers.

She switched on the electric fire as soon as she was inside. She knew she was lucky, also, to feel as well as she did, that her aches and pains often faded if not exactly overnight, then during the course of a few days. Lucky, but not just lucky. You do not get to be old without learning some things, glimpsing a little of the way the world works – assuming you keep your eyes and ears open, at least, and she always had.

She understood that every life involves bargains, and exchange, and recently she had started to believe there were new things to be seen and heard.

Lately, in the last few weeks, she had found herself unsettled from time to time. Waking in the night as if disturbed by movement which had just that moment stopped. Aware of the weight of the house above her, like a dark cloud pregnant with rain. Convinced that, just below the threshold of audibility, someone had raised their voice.

Silly ideas, all of them. She hoped so, at least. Because it was hard to believe that any of them would promise good things.

The old lady removed her coat and hung it neatly on its hook on the back of the door. The key to living anywhere is to know how to live there – just ask any snail. She took from her coat pocket a brown paper bag, containing the snack she habitually took at this time in the late afternoon. Rhythm, order, ritual. The old and the very young understand the importance of these things. It's only in the intervening years that people think they can escape life's structures, not realizing how this apparent freedom traps them in a permanent here and now.

She took a plate from the little cupboard above her sink. She frowned a little, and hesitated before setting the plate down. It felt cold to the touch. The room wasn't warming as quickly as it usually did.

She stood at the counter for a moment and listened to the sound of feet on the pavement above her window as they moved past the house along the rails of their own lives. The footsteps seemed both distant and somewhat loud, against a silence in the house that seemed to grow fuller all the time.

Something was up. She was becoming increasingly convinced of it.

She put the kettle on, to make a cup of tea.

Half an hour later, comfortable in her chair and with enough cake inside her, she found herself dozing. She didn't mind. The room was nice and warm now. Resting her eyes for a few moments might be as good a way as any to prepare for what was coming next.

If you live long enough, everything happens.

And then some of it happens again.

Chapter 1

MARK SAT ON a ridge of pebbles and watched as the colours over the sea started to turn. It had been a bright, clear afternoon, the sky hard and shiny and blue. A line of pink had now appeared along the horizon, and everything was slowly starting to get darker, and greyer, clouds detaching themselves one by one to come creeping over the rest of the sky. It was only a little after four o'clock, but the day was already drawing to a close. It was ending, and the night would start soon.

Normally Mark found you couldn't sit on the rocks for too long before your behind started to hurt. Today that didn't seem to be bothering him, possibly because the rest of him hurt too. Some bits hurt a little, others hurt a lot. They all hurt in slightly different ways. Skateboarding, he had discovered after extensive trials, was not as easy as it looked.

He'd owned his board for over a year – it was one of the last things his father had given him – but Mark hadn't had the chance to start learning how to use it while they were back in London. There had been too much confusion, too many new things to deal with. It hadn't seemed very important, what with everything else. When they'd driven down to the coast in David's car, however – Mark, his mother, and David, naturally – he'd sat all the way with the skateboard on his lap. A form of silent protest which he was not sure they'd understood, or even noticed. In the three weeks since, Mark had finally confronted the process of trying to teach a piece of wood (with wheels attached) which of them was the boss.

So far, the piece of wood was winning.

Mark had been to Brighton before, on long weekends with his mother and proper dad. He knew the seafront fairly well. There was a promenade along the beach, about forty feet lower than the level of the road. This had long stretches where you could walk and ride bikes and roller-blade – almost as if to make up for the fact that there was no sand on the beach, only pebbles, and so you couldn't do much there except sit and look out at the waves and the piers, adjusting your position once in a while to stop it from being too uncomfortable. There were cafés and bars dotted along it – together with a big paddling pool and a play area. Mark was eleven, and thus too old now for these last two entertainment centres. He had still been taken aback to discover that the pool had been drained for the winter, however, the cheerful summer chaos of the playground replaced by a few cold-looking mothers nursing coffees as toddlers dressed like tiny, earth-toned Michelin Men trundled vaguely up and down. Walking past the play area felt like passing a department store in the evening, when the doors were locked and most of the lights were off – just a single person deep inside, doing something at the till, or adjusting a pile of books, like a tidy ghost.

So Mark had spent most afternoons, and some of the mornings, on a stretch of the promenade where there was nothing but a wide, flat area of asphalt. Once this area held the original paddling pool, he'd been told, built when the seafront was very fashionable: but it had been old and not safe – or just not brightly coloured enough, Mark's mother had suggested – and so had been filled in and replaced. There were usually other boys a few years older than Mark hanging around this area, and some had laid out temporary ramps. They scooted up and down on their boards, making little jumps, and when they made it back down safely they peeled off in wide, sweeping arcs, loops of triumph that were actually more fun than the hard business of the tricks themselves – though Mark understood you couldn't have one without the other. These boys crash-landed often too: but not as often as Mark, and not as painfully, and Mark fell when he was only trying to stay on the thing, not do anything clever.

A lot of the boys seemed to know each other, and called out while they were watching their friends: encouragement, occasionally, but more often they laughed and shouted rude words and tried to put the others off. Mark understood that was how it was with friends when you were a boy, but he didn't have anyone to call out to. He didn't know anyone here at all. He skated in silence, and fell off that way too.

When the sky was more dark than light he stood up, the pebbles making a loud scrunching sound beneath his feet and hands. It was time to go home – or back to the house, anyway: the place they now seemed to be living in. A house that belonged to David, and which did not feel anything like home.

From where he stood, Mark could see the long run of houses on the other side of the Hove Lawns and the busy seafront road. These buildings all looked the same, and stretched for about six hundred yards. They were four storeys high, built nearly two hundred years ago, designed to look very similar to each other and painted all the same colour – pale yellowish, the colour of fresh pasta. Apparently this was called ‘Brunswick Cream’ and they all had to be painted that way because they were old and it was the law. The house Mark was staying in was halfway up the right-hand side of Brunswick Square, bang in the middle of the run of buildings. In the centre of the square was a big patch of grass surrounded by a tall ornamental hedge, the whole sloping up from the road so that the houses around all three sides had a good view of the sea. Mark had almost never seen anyone in the park area in the middle. It was almost as if that wasn't what it was for.

As you looked along the front to the right, the buildings changed. They became smaller, more varied, and after a while there were some that looked completely different and not old at all. A few tall buildings made of concrete, two big old hotels (one red, one white), then eventually the cinema, which looked as if it had been built in the dark by someone who didn't like buildings very much. Or so David said, and as a result Mark found he rather liked its featureless, rectangular bulk. You could see films in there, of course, though Mark hadn't. He was only allowed to go along the front in the area bounded by the yellow buildings. He was only permitted down here by himself at all because he'd flat-out refused to stay in the house the whole day, and after enduring a long lecture about talking to strangers. Mark had just stared at David during this, hoping the man would get the point – that he was a stranger too, so far as Mark was concerned. He hadn't.

It was getting cold now, but still Mark didn't start the walk up to the promenade. He stayed a little longer on the border between the sea and the land, wishing he wasn't there at all. He'd liked Brighton in the past. When he'd come with his mother and dad they'd stayed at a modern hotel down past the cinema. His mother spent hours poking around the Lanes, the really old area where the streets were narrow and twisted and most of the stores sold jewellery. They had spent long afternoons on the pier – the big, newer one, with all the rides, not the ruined West Pier, which was closer to Brunswick Square and which someone had, a few years before, set on fire. More than once. But now they were staying in David's house, and all Mark could see was the way the town came down to the sea, and then stopped.

London didn't stop. London went on more or less forever. That was a good thing for towns to do. It was a good thing for everything to do, except visits to museums, or toothache, or colds. Why should things go on for a little while and then stop? How could stopping be a good thing? Brighton ran out. It was interesting and fun for a while and then you hit the beach and it was pebbles and then it stopped and became the sea. The sea was different. The sea wasn't about you and what you wanted. The sea wasn't concerned with anything except itself, and it didn't care about anyone.

Mark watched as the starlings began to fly along the front, heading for the West Pier, and then finally started for home.

Chapter 2

BY THE TIME Mark had walked over the pedestrian crossing and up the pavement around the square, it was quite dark. It looked nice that way, he had to admit, lights coming on in the other houses.

When he got to David's house he noticed another light there, too.

The building they were living in was tall like the others, three big storeys above street level with a further lower one at the very top. To the right of the wide steps which led up to the front door there was a little curving staircase that headed downwards. It was made of metal which had been painted black more than once but was now leaking rust. Losing a long battle against the salty air, like everything else on the seafront. At the bottom of this staircase was a tiny basement courtyard, about four feet deep by eight feet wide, and under the steps to the main house was another door. There was a window in the front of this section, a smaller version of the big bow-fronted windows above. It was covered with lace curtains, which meant you couldn't see inside. Apparently someone else lived there, an old woman. David, who liked to explain everything – like the fact his accent sounded weird at times because he'd spent a long time living in America – had explained that although he owned the whole house, the basement was a self-contained flat which he hadn't even been inside. The woman who lived there had been there for years and years and years, and so he'd agreed to let her stay. Mark had never seen any actual evidence that anyone lived there, and had half-wondered if the whole story had been a lie to keep him out of that part of the house.

But tonight there was a glow behind the curtains, dim and yellow, as if from a single lamp with a weak bulb.

He let himself into the main house with his keys. The hallway felt cold and bare. David had had the whole place painted white inside before they moved down from London. He had never lived here himself, having bought it only six months ago using all the money he'd made while he was away doing whatever boring thing he'd been doing in America.

Mark shut the door very quietly behind him; but not quietly enough.

‘Mark? Is that you?’

His stepfather's voice sounded flat and hard as it echoed down the wide staircase from the floor above. Mark put his skateboard in the room that was serving as his bedroom, on the right-hand side of the corridor, and slowly started up the stairs.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

Who else was it going to be?

His mother's bedroom was on the second floor, the highest level currently in use. The top two floors were closed up and used for storage, the rooms uncarpeted and bare, with heating that didn't work. Mark got the idea that David didn't have enough money left to do anything about them right now.

His mother was in the front room when he walked in. ‘Hello, honey,’ she said. ‘How was your day?’

She was on the couch which had been put in the middle of the front room on this floor, the one with the wide bay window looking over the square. There was a thick blanket over her. The television in the corner was on, but the sound was turned off.

Originally the idea had been that this would be Mark's room, but soon after they'd got down here it had become obvious his mother wasn't finding the stairs easy. She needed somewhere to spend time on this level, because it drove her nuts to be stuck in the bedroom all day, and so Mark had wound up in the room underneath, which was supposed to be a sitting room. He didn't mind, because his mother needed it to be this way, but it still felt as if he was camping out.

Mark kissed her on the cheek, trying to remember how many days it had been since she had left the house. This room looked nice, at least. There were four or five lamps, all casting a glow, and the only pictures in the house were on its walls.

She smiled up at him. ‘Any luck?’

‘A little,’ he said, but – having been trained by her to be honest, he upturned his palms to reveal the grazes. ‘Not a lot.’

She winced. Mark noticed that the lines around her eyes, which hadn't even been there six months ago, looked a little deeper, and that there were a couple more grey hairs amongst the deep, rich brown.

‘It's okay,’ he said. ‘I'll get there.’

‘Sure you will,’ said a voice.

David came out of his mother's bedroom, looking the way he always did. He was slim and a little over medium height and he wore a pair of neatly-pressed chinos and a denim shirt, as usual. His nose was straight. His hair was floppy but somehow neat. He looked – according to a friend Mark had back in London, whose uncle worked in the stock exchange and so had experience of these matters – like someone for whom every day was Dress Down Friday. He did not look at all like Mark's real father, who had short hair and was strongly built and wore jeans and T-shirts all the time and in general looked like someone you didn't want to get in a fight with.

David was drying his hands on a small towel. Mark found this annoying.

‘Let's see,’ he said, cocking his head at Mark.

‘Just a graze,’ Mark muttered, not showing him. ‘What are we eating? Can we order from Wo Fat?’

The question had been directed solely at his mother, but David squatted down to talk to him. This made him a good deal shorter than Mark, which seemed an odd thing to do. Mark wasn't a little child.

‘Your mother's not feeling too hungry,’ David said, with the voice he used for saying things like that, and just about everything else. ‘I went to the supermarket earlier. There's cool stuff in the fridge. Maybe you could forage yourself something from there?’

‘But…’ Mark said. What he wanted to say was that he'd done that the previous evening, and the night before, not to mention both lunchtimes. Also that frequently ordering food in from Wo Fat, a Chinese restaurant up on Western Road, was traditional when they stayed down in Brighton – though this was a ritual which involved Mark's real father, not David.

Mark caught sight of his mother, however, and didn't say either of these things. She smiled at him again, and shrugged.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow, maybe, okay?’

Mark nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He was furious at David for putting his mother in this position, for making her be the one who apologized when Mark knew it was David who didn't really approve of takeaways, and who felt she should only be eating very healthy things. Who just didn't … get it.

Didn't get anything. Shouldn't be here.

‘Right – maybe tomorrow,’ David said, unconvincingly.

‘Who knows – perhaps we'll even go out to eat.’

Mark sat on the couch and talked with his mother for a while, and then they watched some television together. She moved the blanket so it lay over the two of them, and it was nice, even though David was hovering in the background doing whatever it was he always did.

‘You must be getting hungry, aren't you?’ his stepfather said, after half an hour.

Mark turned to stare at him. His mother was looking tired, and Mark knew what was being implied. But it wasn't David's place to say it, and Mark wanted him to realize that. David just looked back with eyes that were equally unblinking.

Mark muttered goodnight and took himself downstairs, where he made a ham sandwich in the kitchen, added a couple of biscuits, and took the plate into ‘his’ room with the last available Diet Coke.

There was no carpet on the floor of his room and nothing on the walls, and it was not terribly warm. The sash window did not fit snugly and rattled a little sometimes in the night.

He sat with a blanket around his shoulders and watched his little television for a couple of hours, but soon he felt tired from another long afternoon of falling off his skateboard, and went to bed.

When he dreamed, it was of being back in the house in London. Though that house had been a lot smaller than the one in Brighton, it had been a real home. The place where he'd been born, grown up, had friends to visit, waited for Santa Claus to come every year – even after his father had explained that there was no such thing.

Mark dreamed he was in the back garden there, kicking a ball around with his dad. They ran around together, knocking it back and forth, faster and faster. Mark was better at it than he'd ever been before, always managing to return his dad's searching passes, earning grins and laughs and shouts of approval for each time he sent it singing back. They both started panting, getting out of breath but keeping at it, knowing there was some kind of force acting through them now, something outside their control, that they had to keep playing while it lasted, no matter how tired they got.

Then Mark's father kicked the ball in a completely different direction.

They hadn't been making it easy for each other before, but at least he'd been kicking it somewhere Mark had a chance of getting to. This last kick wasn't a pass he was ever going to be able to intercept. The ball went sailing clean over the fence on a trajectory that was low and flat and weirdly slow. It flew silently, disappearing into a twilight that arrived suddenly and yet then felt as if it had been there forever. Mark turned his head to watch it go, wondering if he was ever going to be able to get the ball back. He watched also because it meant he did not have to look back at his father's face, in case he saw there that this kick had not been an accident, that his dad had deliberately kicked it over the fence.