The Servants

by Michael Marshall Smith

  “Perhaps if I was not forced to pick up so much of the slack above-stairs, I would be able to keep a closer eye down here—butler.”

  Mark had hoped that by distracting their attention he might be able to stop what they had started, but it wasn’t working, not even a little bit. The noise was getting louder and louder, the swirl of smoke and ash starting to revolve faster. He could barely see Emily now at all, though she was only a couple of yards away.

  “Above-stairs is my concern,” the butler ranted. “And above-stairs is the heart of this house. My house. My realm.”

  Mrs. Wallis grabbed something out of the mess on the big kitchen table.

  “No, it is my house,” she said, with a sudden and ominous control in her voice. “And its heart and well-being is rooted down here, and I shall do whatever is necessary to help you to understand that.”

  She was holding a knife.

  They started circling each other, and once again their voices quickly lost coherence, became part of the wind. The ringing bells had now melded into one perpetual wall of sound, so loud it was more like being hit with something. The air was so hot that the ash was melting as it fell, the atmosphere so thick with dripping soot that it was like seeing a picture in negative.

  Mark glimpsed Martha’s face through it for a second. The cook was still slumped over the stove, still trying to do whatever it was she had been told to do. Her face was now a livid moonscape of cracked skin and boils, her eyes almost lost in the swellings. Mark caught the miserable look in one of these, and knew that the only person in the room still trying to do anything was close to giving up.

  He stepped right in between the butler and the housekeeper, and gathered all the breath he could, pulling it deep into his lungs. It burned on the way down but he kept sucking it in, until he was full, and then let it out in one screaming bellow of sound:

  “Look, will you both just shut up!”

  SILENCE. Utter silence.

  Still the ash and soot circled and fell. Still the bells hammered. Still the air pulsed. But these sounds and noises fell against each other, and for a moment canceled each other out. The room was silent, as if it was all held in the balance, the cacophony waiting to burst forth again.

  “The house doesn’t belong to either of you!” Mark shouted. “Don’t you see?”

  They stared at him.

  “You work here. For the house. It needs both of you.”

  Mr. Maynard started to say something, but Mark overrode him.

  “The old lady told me all about it, how it works. You greet people. You look after the wine. You keep order above-stairs.”

  He turned to the housekeeper. “You order the food. You organize what meals happen, and when. You deal with people at the lower door.”

  Back to the butler. “You deal with the master of the house.”

  Then back to Mrs. Wallis. “You talk to the mistress.”

  He looked around, at Emily, then Martha, and the pale hand in the corner that was all you could now see of the scullery maid—then turned back to address the butler and the housekeeper at once.

  “And then you talk to each other, because otherwise nothing makes sense and nothing gets done and nobody else understands what they’re supposed to do—and this is what happens.”

  Nobody said anything, and Mark didn’t know what else to say.

  “It’s not your house,” he repeated. “It’s just the house.”

  And then he walked out of the kitchen, pushing through the hanging ash with both hands, his eyes feeling hot and hard and dry.

  HE went straight down the corridor and opened the door without worrying what might be on the other side. The old lady’s room was dark and empty. She was still out, playing cards. He put the key in the drawer and left.

  He trudged up the steps and made it from the fence to the windowsill. He let himself in. He climbed into his pajamas.

  He got into bed.

  He cried.

  And a long time later, he fell asleep.

  nineteen

  The first thing Mark heard the next morning was a siren. He heard it start a long way off, down the seafront, like the police siren he’d heard the first night he’d been below-stairs by himself.

  But he knew, somehow, that it wasn’t a police car he was hearing.

  He leaped out of bed and pulled on some clothes, and was dressed by the time the ambulance pulled up outside—but then he heard the sound of David’s footsteps hurrying down the stairs, and stayed where he was. He heard a conversation start in the hallway, a conversation that got more distant as they moved outside.

  Mark ran over to the window and looked out.

  David was standing with two ambulance people, a man and a woman. They were looking up at his mother’s window, while David kept talking, urgently. Mark couldn’t make out what he was saying until the very end, when he heard a single sentence.

  “One more day,” David said.

  The paramedics got back in and drove away, with no siren this time. As the ambulance left, it revealed someone who had been standing on the sidewalk on the other side. A man.

  Mark’s father.

  He was standing next to his big red car, with the door open. From where Mark stood, staring out through the window, he could conjure the smell of the vehicle’s interior as clearly as if he were actually inside: surrounded by its comforting bulk, in position behind the driver’s seat, where he always sat. His seat. One of his places in the world.

  “Don’t ever do something like that again.”

  This was David, who was standing in the middle of the road, staring at Mark’s father.

  Mark’s father was staring back. “Someone needs to do some—”

  “Not you, and not that.”

  Mark’s father took a step toward David. David didn’t move. Mark’s dad was a good deal bigger than David. David didn’t seem to care. “I’m serious,” he added. “And she wants you to leave now. I’d like that too.”

  Mark wanted to call out, to go running out to the street. The man out there still looked like his father, was even wearing a shirt Mark recognized. The cells in Mark’s body felt pulled toward him.

  But the window was in the way: the window, or something else. Mark lived in a different house from his father now, and they were bounded by different walls. He remained silent, motionless.

  His father spoke again. “I’m her—”

  “No, you’re not,” David said. “You’re not her anything now. Only one thing connects you two. Maybe you should focus on that.” And he jerked his head toward the house.

  Mark shrank back from the window, not wanting either of the men to see him watching. His father hesitated, but in the end didn’t even glance Mark’s way.

  “Not all of us can just sit around all day,” he snapped. “Got to get back up to London. Back to work.”

  He got in his car and drove away.

  David stayed out there for a few moments longer, staring at the sea, and then turned and came back inside.

  AS Mark walked up the last few stairs to his mother’s level, his heart was beating hard. He could hear David’s voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “I called him yesterday. I thought I should. He needs to know what’s happening.”

  “I don’t want him to.”

  Mark barely recognized his mother’s voice, it sounded so weak.

  “I understand that. But he’s involved. He has to know what’s going on.”

  “And look what he—”

  “I didn’t know he was going to call them, honey. Or come down here. I didn’t know you even could mobilize an ambulance like that.”

  “He can be convincing. He had me convinced for a long time.”

  “Look, I’m sorry.”

  “They’ve gone now?”

  David hesitated, for just a beat. “Yes. They’ve gone.”

  “And he…?”

  Mark walked in at that moment. His mother was in Position One, on the couch, but it had never appeared like
this before. Position One, overnight, had become a lot more grim than Position Two.

  She was propped up, but looked twisted. Her hair was lank, and her face looked worse than gray. As he got closer, he realized that the edges of her lower eyelids were pink and swollen. There was a smell coming off her, too, and Mark realized with dismay it was this that he had been smelling for the last few days, the odor that had been there in the house all along. It couldn’t be, not really—it couldn’t have reached all the way to the basement from here—but somehow, it was.

  The adults dropped their conversation like a stone. Looking caught, and a little guilty.

  “Are you okay?” Mark asked his mother.

  “I’m…” She paused for a moment. “Actually, I’m not feeling very good, Mark.”

  “In what way?”

  “In a lot of ways. I need to rest a little this morning, okay?”

  “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  “I couldn’t get comfortable.”

  Mark didn’t believe her. He knew there was another reason, something she wasn’t telling him. He turned to David, but his stepfather was staring out of the window at the end of the room, a blank expression on his face.

  “I had to keep getting up in the night,” his mother said delicately. “So it was easier for me to be here. That’s all.”

  Mark nodded jerkily.

  “Be careful this morning,” she said. “Okay? Make sure you don’t fall off too…badly.”

  For a moment, he wasn’t sure what she was talking about, and then he got it. “I won’t,” he said.

  He glanced over at David as he left the room, but his stepfather was still staring out of the window as if he was thinking about something, and thinking hard.

  MARK did pick up his skateboard, and he did go down to the area on the seafront. The Brighton weather gods had flipped a coin again overnight, and the sky was clear and cold and blue.

  He coasted up and down for a while. He sat and watched other kids do things, then saw the groups split up, and the children gradually drift away. Then he coasted up and down some more, looping in big arcs around the empty space. He saw the sunlight flashing off the windows of the houses on the other side of the road. He heard the ting-ting-ting of rigging on the small boats and windsurfing contraptions that were gathered on the pebbles: not exhibits, like the boats down by the fishing museum, but things people actually used sometimes. He saw the gray, blue, and green lines of cold water in the sea, the silent white crests along the top of the waves. He heard the rumbling scrunch of his wheels, as he went up and down and back.

  All of these sights and sounds passed into him and out the other side, like pebbles rolling down a pipe.

  His head was about as empty as it had ever been. He assumed he must have slept overnight, because he couldn’t remember lying awake, but he felt more as if he had been put in some box instead, taken out again this morning, and pushed into the light. He didn’t really know what to think of what had happened earlier, hadn’t yet found a way of processing it. The worst of it was that he felt guilty for not running out to greet his father, and did not know how much of this was down to the realization he’d come to while drinking tea by himself in the hotel the afternoon before. But if his father didn’t know what he’d been thinking, then why had he just driven off?

  Was everything broken now?

  One of the kids from earlier had left a single plank ramp behind. Mark cruised toward it. He hit the ramp much more slowly than was his custom, intending to just drop off the other side and go.

  As he did so, he twisted his feet, softly kicking down with one, and curling the other inside. The board rolled under his feet as if it had been glued to them, as though the laws of physics had been designed to keep it and Mark in close proximity at all times.

  Mark landed with the board underneath his feet, the back wheels hitting the sidewalk a beat ahead of the front, and then rolled on as if nothing had happened. He let the momentum carry him as far as it would, and then ground to a halt.

  He knew he ought to feel something.

  But he did not.

  HE wanted to go back to the house, but he didn’t want to go back to the house. He wanted to see his mother, but also, he didn’t. He was afraid of it, of her. He knew that he had taken too many things for granted for a long while—like the idea that every time you did something it would be more or less the same.

  He knew now that this wasn’t so.

  When he went back to the house, it would not feel like the last time, and next time it would feel different too. Things were changing. Things were not remaining the same. Real life did not go on forever, like London did. The reality was far more like Brighton.

  Things changed. Things stopped. Things fell away into the sea.

  He went to The Meeting Place and bought a cup of tea. It was half the price of the big hotel, and they made it stronger, too. He sat in the shelter of one of the big yellow windbreaks, and drank it as slowly as he could. He put his skateboard on the chair next to him, but it looked like something he had borrowed from another kid.

  He knew he couldn’t leave it any longer. He had to go back.

  IT was lunchtime, and he stood in the kitchen for a few minutes, but didn’t feel like eating. Eventually, he gave up, and walked slowly up the stairs. He was expecting Position Two, and that’s how she was.

  The horrible thing was that Position Two was now not the worst. Position Two suddenly looked like a step up from the way he’d seen her that morning, which he supposed was the new Position Three. Would there be a Four soon, and then a Five?

  Six? Nine? How many positions were there? Did they go on forever? Or did there come a point where they stopped—a position beyond which there was nowhere else to go? There would be a name for that position, and he knew it already, and that it would not have a number.

  Either way, she was sleeping. She had been covered up warmly with a blanket, and her head was tilted to one side. Mark was uncomfortably reminded of the way the old lady downstairs had looked, just before he went into the servants’ quarters for the second time on his own. As if the strings that operated her had gone slack.

  He sat on the couch and watched his mother for a little while, and then got up and went to the big window at the end of the room. He’d been looking out for some time before he realized someone was in the park, and that it was David.

  His stepfather was walking up and down, and talking on his cell phone. Out there, seen from inside the house, David looked even more like a stranger. Also younger, and farther away.

  Mark drifted away from the window and went back to the couch.

  A few minutes later, he heard the door open downstairs and David’s footsteps coming up. He poked his head in the doorway, saw Mark sitting there, and crooked his finger.

  Mark considered resisting, or feigning incomprehension, but then got up. When he got out onto the landing, David took a few steps backward, indicating for Mark to follow him.

  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?”

  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 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.

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

  “What a beautiful afternoon,” she said.