The Servants

by Michael Marshall Smith

  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 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, 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. 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. 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.

  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.

  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 lik
e 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, 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 exchanged 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.

  He did not comprehend all these things clearly yet, or in words he could say, but as he sat and stared out of the window at the black car driving away, the paths of understanding were laid in his mind, the sad walkways that later in life would shape the routes by which he understood the world and its ways. And for now, from a place inside him so deep he had no inkling it even existed, he cried.

  And cried, and cried.

  THE tears came in waves, but they did not stop. He didn’t even know what time it was anymore. It had to be after seven, maybe eight, but David was right about one thing—when things really came down to it, time didn’t matter much inside.

  He got halfway to his door again, wanting to go upstairs and be with his mother, but was stopped once more by the sound of coughing from above. It seemed to get louder and louder with each bout, as if it was coming to him not down through his ceiling but somehow echoed out of every wall, and up through the floor.

  He could not bear to see her coughing that way, as if something was being ripped apart inside her. He knew what it meant, now. He didn’t have to see it for himself. He would rather stare out into darkness. It was the same thing, but did not hurt as much.

  He stumbled back to the window, barely able to see through a fresh fall of tears. His stomach was cramping and he was out of breath, dried out, and yet still he cried and cried. He stared down at the park, trying to imagine ever not feeling this way.

  Two people were standing in the street. One was tall, the other was short.

  Mark blinked, trying to stop the tears. Something about the figures looked familiar.

  He rubbed the back of one hand quickly across his eyes. His vision was still blurred afterward, but he could make out that the tall figure was a man and wore a tight black suit. The short figure was a woman in a white apron. It was Mr. Maynard, and Mrs. Wallis.

  How on earth could they be outside?

  Mark rubbed his eyes again. They were standing on the opposite side of the street, close to the hedge, talking together urgently. They did not look as if they were fighting, however, but as if they had some joint business that required a speedy resolution.

  Mr. Maynard bobbed his head, in brisk agreement. Mrs. Wallis nodded too. Then they both turned their heads and looked up at his window.

  Mark blinked, and they were gone. The street was empty.

  He was still standing at the window, motionless and bewildered, when he heard the doorbell. He could not imagine what was happening, who could possibly be at the door.

  He heard David’s footsteps coming down the stairs, and the door being opened. A low, quiet conversation.

  Then a knock on his bedroom door.

  WHEN he opened it, David was standing there. His stepfather looked exhausted, his eyes wide and flat.

  “There’s someone here for you,” he said. He stepped back, out of the way. Mark walked slowly out of his room.

  The old lady from the basement was standing neatly in the doorway to the house.

  “I wondered if you might come downstairs,” she said. “I have a cake of which I believe you’ve become fond.”

  Without consciously making the decision, Mark found himself following her onto the steps outside. He was halfway down to the sidewalk when his stepfather said his name.

  “Mark.”

  Mark turned to look at David, still standing in the corridor. “Is there something you can do?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said.

  He felt David looking into him in a way no one but his mother had ever done before.

  His stepfather nodded once.

  “Do it,” he said.

  Then he slowly closed the door.

  twenty-two

  The old lady didn’t say anything on the way down the metal stairs, nor as she opened her door or led him inside, or until they were standing in her room, warm as ever, and with the clock going tick so loudly Mark could feel the sound in his chest. He looked at her table. There were no plates on it, no brown paper bag.

  “A little fib,” she said. “There is no cake.”

  “But what—”

  “You won’t need it tonight,” she said. “I believe you remember where the key is kept?”

  He looked at her, feeling caught out and afraid. The old lady’s gaze was open and direct, and he realized with some confusion that she had known all along, and that her door had not been left unlocked last night by accident. That when she’d said someone must watch the starlings, she had not been making fun of him.

  He remained frozen, however, not knowing what to do.

  “Go ahead,” she said, going to the stove. “I’ll get the kettle on.”

  He took the key.

  HIS first thought was that the corridor beyond the big door was even worse than he’d remembered. It was hard to close the door behind him, the piles of ash on the floor were so thick and so high. But he leaned against it with all his weight and shoved, and then suddenly it was closed.

  He took a couple of hesitant steps toward the kitchen, not knowing what to do now that he was here. There was one change, at least. Though the air was still heavy, and too warm, and the bad and sickly smell was everywhere, at least the terrible rushing and swirling sound from last time had stopped. There was a background noise, but now it was a
kind of low, thudding sound. A faint thunk…thunk…thunk…with perhaps a second between each beat. Mark thought the sound had perhaps always been there, obscured by other noises.

  “Ah-ha,” said a voice triumphantly, and Mark suddenly found himself being pulled forward.

  He looked up to see that Mr. Maynard had appeared from nowhere. He grasped Mark by the shoulder and drove him toward the end of the passageway.

  “How opportune.” The butler beamed. “I’m glad our associate was able to entice you down to us—an excellent stroke of chance. I hesitate to call once more upon your good offices, Master Mark—as you were of such valuable assistance on the last occasion you graced our quarters—but perhaps…?”

  He stopped, head cocked and held close to Mark’s, peering very directly at him. “Might you lend us just a few moments of your time?”

  Mark blinked. Nodded.

  “Wonderful,” Mr. Maynard said, looking like a rooster whose crowing had recently won a major international award. “Then please, if you would just follow me…”

  With his shoulder still firmly grasped by the butler’s bony hand, Mark didn’t have to do much following. He was swept at trotting pace into the kitchen, and then brought to a sudden halt.

  Though no ash was falling, and the bells were silent, this room, too, looked worse than ever before. It was full of congealed grime and black snow, and bloody, congealed fat. The sinks and all the surfaces were covered in plates and pans that looked as if they had once held far less appealing burdens than food. The floor was a distant memory. The smell rolling out of the meat and dairy stores was truly appalling.

  Three people stood in the room.

  Martha, in front of her range. Over by one of the sinks, the scullery maid in gray. And by the back stairs, Emily. All stood with straight, proud backs, their hands neatly together at their waists, despite the fact that all stood thigh-deep in muck.

  “Good evening, Master Mark,” they said, in unison.

  “Good evening indeed,” said another voice.

  Mrs. Wallis came bustling in from the corridor behind, rubbing her hands together. She stood in front of the butler. “Mr. Maynard,” she said, with a half-smile. “I trust you are well?”