The Servants (15 page)

As he battled against the wind, he drew closer to the tilted ruin of the West Pier hanging over the choppy, opaque sea. The seafront was deserted, except for . . . At first he blinked, thinking it was something that had been blown into his eye, like a thick speck of ash. But it wasn’t. It was someone not very tall, standing near the place where the pier had used to meet the land, bundled up in a thick black coat.

When he got within a few yards of her, Mark slowed, but the old lady didn’t turn around. She seemed to be looking out at the twisted iron mesh of the pier. He couldn’t imagine why. She was wearing a hat, pulled down tightly over her ears, and the exposed part of her face looked very old, like weathered boards, as if it too had withstood many years and long nights of cold and bitter wind.

“Hello, Mark,” she said, without turning.

He was startled, not having thought she had any idea he was there. “What are you doing?”

“Watching the starlings.”

Mark looked harder, and saw that a few early starlings were indeed looping around the end of the pier, like motes of

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dust caught in a strong circling wind. Only a handful, and nowhere near enough to make it worth standing out here in this cold, surely. “Why?”

“Somebody must,” she said. “Or they might just fly away. Never come back.”

Mark didn’t know what to say to this. Did she even mean it? “Are you heading back to the house?”

She finally drew her gaze from the pier, and shook her head. “I have an evening in town to look forward to. Several hours of card games and genteel conversation with a very old and very dear friend.”

“That . . . sounds like fun.”

“Not really,” the old lady sighed. “She’s been boring me rigid for over sixty years. I’m sure she feels the same.”

“So why do you still do it?”

“Because somebody must,” she said, and winked, and walked away.

The wind in his ears helped him to not think much about anything for most of the rest of the way back to the house. When Brighton got like this—and it sometimes did, especially in winter—the road along the seafront became like one long wind tunnel. It was already starting to get dark, and Mark crossed back over the road and stuck close to the buildings there. By the time he finally reached Brunswick Square, his ears and cheeks were numb and even his hair felt freezing against his scalp. He lurched slightly as he turned the corner into the square as the wind dropped suddenly there, in the same way your feet sometimes felt weird when you got

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h back on the promenade after walking for a long time on the pebbles.

It was much quieter here too, the tall buildings creating a pocket against the continual rushing wind, and when he was about halfway up to the house, Mark heard the sound of someone talking.

He turned around, wondering where the voice was coming from. There was no one else on this stretch of sidewalk. He wondered if the sound was echoing from some other place, but he couldn’t see anyone, and the voice seemed too quiet anyway. He turned back, really hoping there was going to be a straightforward explanation.

Then he realized the sound was coming from the center of the square, from the other side of the tall hedge. As he walked closer, more carefully now, Mark began to pick out the words of what was being said.

“I understand that,” a male voice said patiently. “All I’m doing is respecting her choices.”

There was a pause. Whoever was on the other side of the fence was talking on a cell phone.

“Of course we will,” the man said firmly, and Mark stopped dead in his tracks. He recognized the voice now. It was David.

As the conversation continued, Mark spotted a portion of the hedge a little way up that was threadbare, and made his way to it. Proceeding very carefully, he pushed himself into the patchy section, turning his face back toward the sound of David’s voice.

Yes, there he was. His stepfather was sitting on one of the

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benches inside the park, which was set against the interior of the surrounding hedge. He looked tired, and his face was set.

“No, I don’t think she does,” David said. “That’s nothing to do with me. But I can think of someone who probably
would
like to hear from you.” He listened for a moment. “You know the phone number at the house. It would be a pretty short step from there, don’t you think?”

Mark frowned. He couldn’t imagine whom he was talking to, but this was a tone of voice he’d never heard from David before.

“Fine—you do that,” David said suddenly, and hit a button to cut the connection.

Mark watched as David closed his eyes for a moment, jaw clenched, and then slowly dialed another number. When he got through to this new person, David talked for a couple of minutes, describing Mark’s mother’s health over the last twenty-four hours. He then nodded in silence for quite some time.

“Yes, I’ll call,” he said eventually. His voice was quieter now. “I’ll talk to her, and then I’ll call. Thank you.”

He put the phone in his pocket, then sat with his face in his hands. When he raised his head again, Mark saw how hollow his eyes looked.

David seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then put his hand back into his jacket pocket. Mark thought he was going to make another call, but the hand emerged with something else entirely.

He put this in his mouth, got out a box of matches, and lit it.

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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 watched, open-mouthed, as David took a drag on the cigarette. When he let the smoke back out, it was as if all of the air slowly seeped out of him. He took two more quick puffs, dropped the cigarette to the ground, and put it out with his heel. Then he pulled out the pack from his pocket, scrunched it up, and dropped it in the trash can by the side of the bench.

By the time he’d got to his feet, Mark was already on the other side of the little road and letting himself into the house.

He stood in his room, silent and motionless, the lights still off, as he heard his stepfather enter the building. He thought David’s footsteps slowed slightly as he passed Mark’s door, but then they continued upstairs. They had been heavy in the corridor, but got lighter with each step he went up. Mark heard him cheerfully call “Yvonne?” as he reached the upper level, and then it went quieter—though he could hear the muffled sound of a conversation.

Mark sat on the bed. In all the time David had been in their lives, Mark had
never
seen him smoke. But he must have been, from time to time—even if, as it appeared, he was trying to give it up.

As he turned this information over in his mind, Mark began to think he’d finally understood what the old lady meant about people being like the floor downstairs. There was the part that everyone knew, and then a door. And behind that?

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P A R T

III

seventeen

The feeling came on as Mark was having his shower. He was standing there, enjoying the hot water pouring down onto him, waiting for its warmth to seep inside him, where he still felt cold. But, slowly, he realized the real sensation of cold was inside his head, and it wasn’t actually coldness at all, but panic. He hadn’t understood the words David had used in his second phone call, but he’d understood the tone. Together with what he’d said on the beach, it had presented a reality Mark had never confronted before.

Suddenly he felt too hot, hemmed in, as if the steam in the shower was threatening to coalesce, trapping him in there forever.

He turned off the taps and quickly got dressed. When he got upstairs, his mother was in what he now thought of as Position One—on the couch, propped up with cushions, vaguely looking through a magazine. Mark was gathering this was better than Position Two—on the chair—

but she still didn’t look great.

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h She smiled when he came in, however.

“Fine,” he said, before she could even ask. “I went for a long walk.”

“How long?” David asked. He appeared from the bedroom, as he seemed to enjoy doing. He was not holding a towel but one of the small white boxes that lined the mantelpiece, boxes that had nothing on them but writing, in a typeface that did not seem designed to communicate anything fun. He was peering down at it, and Mark felt a violent twist of anger at him, amplified by the strange, anxious feeling he still had in his head and chest. David didn’t look like the man he’d seen in the park now, not at all.

“Long, long, long,” Mark said. “All the way to the other pier.”

“You were told that you weren’t allowed to—”

“I know,” Mark said cheerfully. “Then I went into the big hotel and had a cup of tea.”

His mother and David glanced at each other. Mark knew he was asking for trouble, but couldn’t seem to stop himself. He felt as if he had started to tremble deep inside. The room seemed far too warm.

“Can I open a window?”

David shook his head firmly. “Your mother needs to be protected,” he said.

Right—and you’re the only person who can do that.
His mother smiled at him again. Usually it was nice when she did this, but for a moment Mark wondered whether she’d just forgotten that she’d already done it, and had a horrible suspicion she was going to ask him what his day had been like.

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“So, what are we eating?” he said, to forestall this. “Are we going out?”

His mother made a face as if she was genuinely considering the idea, and David made one too, as if he was waiting to hear what she thought. Mark knew the decision had already been made.

“Okay,” he said, to save either of them having to say no.

“So . . . ?”

“There’s food in the fridge,” David said. “Cold cuts and stuff. I wondered if maybe you’d like to put together something for us all?”

This was a strange request, but Mark bounced up off the couch, glad of the chance to get out of the room.

“Okay.”

He went downstairs and into the kitchen. Yes, there was food in the fridge. No Diet Coke, obviously, but plenty of things to eat. He went to the cupboard and got down one of the big serving plates. He could hear quiet voices through the ceiling now, probably David pointing out what a pain Mark was being.

He stacked three dinner plates next to the serving dish and started ferrying stuff out of the fridge. There was cold beef, and chicken. There was a kind of pork pie. There was cheese, and little tomatoes, and salads—one made of weird-colored rice and another with potatoes and yet another with beetroot, which Mark thought was vile. He started ladling spoonfuls of each onto the big plate, however, remembering how he’d seen his mother do this when friends had come to the house in London—arranging stuff out of packets or brown paper

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h until it looked like something different and better, like a real meal.

He moved faster and faster, becoming absorbed. Slices of meat around the edge. Cutting square chunks of cheese, arranging them with the tomatoes, cut in half. He only realized how hot he was getting when a drop of sweat fell from his forehead and onto the plate.

It was really,
really
boiling now. He wiped his face with his sleeve. Had David done something stupid to the heating?

Mark ran upstairs. They were sitting either end of the couch, not saying anything. As if they had just stopped.

“What’s wrong with the heating?” Mark said.

“Nothing. Are you okay? You look kind of red in the face.”

Mark ignored him and ran downstairs again. Finished preparing the big plate and then stood for a moment in front of the fridge with the door open. It helped, a little. He went over to the radiator against the wall and put his hand on it, expecting it to be white-hot—but it wasn’t even switched on, though it sounded as if something was thudding in the building somewhere. Maybe there was a problem with the system, as well as everything else.

As he left the room with the plates and a pocket full of silverware, he thought he heard the sound of flapping, but it was only the television being turned on in the room upstairs. His mother was really impressed and kept saying what a lovely job he’d done. David nodded judiciously and said

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“Good job,” too, running the two words into one. He certainly took enough onto his plate. Obviously this was the kind of food he liked.

Mark picked at his own meal. He still seemed to be getting hotter and hotter. It was stopping him being properly hungry. He watched as his mother ate a couple of pieces of tomato, and a small piece of cheese and then stopped. The television was showing the news, and the grown-ups watched it. Mark gazed into space instead, wondering what was wrong with him, if maybe he’d finally caught a cold or flu from all the time he’d spent outside.

And then suddenly he focused, and all at once he did not feel hot anymore. He was looking in a different direction from David and his mother, across at the other corner of the room. There was something floating in the air. Something small and nearly weightless.

Something dark.

Mark blinked, hoping it was something in his eye, a shadow floating across the inside in the way they sometimes did. But it wasn’t.

He watched the speck as it slowly, slowly spiraled down toward the carpet.

It was a piece of black ash.

He put down his fork, intending to get up and look at it. He didn’t have a chance to even stand up, however, before he realized it was not the only one. Another piece was floating down in the opposite corner of the room. It was a little larger, maybe the size of Mark’s thumb. Like, he now realized, the

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h one he’d cleaned off the surface down in the kitchen a couple of nights before.

It drifted down past the television screen, but neither of the grown-ups said anything.

Then there was a third. This was much closer to where he was sitting, and he watched it as it came down. It got lower, and lower.