The Servants (20 page)

“Thank you, darling,” Martha said absently, as she started pulling ingredients and pans toward her from all directions. She glanced at Mr. Maynard as he swept, and Mark saw her raise an eyebrow—as though she’d never seen the butler engaged in anything as lowly as this task—and then started cooking in earnest.

Mark had been wondering how they were supposed to get

  

t h e s e r va n t s

rid of all of the mess on the floor, not least because pushing it from one area simply meant it was twice as deep in its new location, but soon understood that something odd was happening. As he followed Mr. Maynard’s lead, he discovered that once the detritus had been brushed around the kitchen one and a half times, it simply disappeared. What had seemed an impossible task now began to seem feasible, and he worked faster and faster, ducking when necessary to keep out of the butler’s way—and also to avoid Martha, as she thundered with increasing purpose and speed about the kitchen, grabbing
this
from the meat store, and
that
from the dairy, barking instructions at the scullery maid all the while. As Mark and the butler swept and brushed, Emily reappeared down the back stairs with a large tray, which she lined up at the end of the washing. Then she too rolled up her sleeves, stepped back just in time for the scullery maid to deliver a slosh of hot water into the sink, and attacked the pile of crockery.

Mrs. Wallis strode in, carrying a wooden box of vegetables, fresh carrots whose scent cut sweetly through the undercurrent of dirt and grime. The scullery maid filled a bucket with soapy water, grabbed a new cloth, and started tackling the walls. And though the bells started slowly to ring on the wall, their tone was clear and pure.

They swept and they brushed and more water was boiled and the pile of pans and pots clattered and slid and became clean.

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h More food arrived and was sorted and stacked, and when the bells fell silent for brief and blessed spells, the kitchen rang instead with the sound of fine china being washed and then arranged tidily on shelves. Often it was barely there for a moment before it was pressed once again into service, put on a tray and run upstairs as another tea or lunch or dinner or breakfast was yet again ready, the smell of the kitchen slowly tilting from rank and sour decay to the other odors—custard, homemade from cream and eggs and vanilla; sweet dry-cured bacon; the tang of fresh-cut horseradish; and small dishes of Martha’s orange marmalade, all melding into one. Sometimes Mr. Maynard brushed at Mark’s side, at other times he disappeared to attend to the master or greet visitors at the upper door or otherwise ensure the smooth running of the intricate
ins and outs
—as he put it—of life above-stairs. Mrs. Wallis was in perpetual movement too, waltzing in and out of the kitchen, along the passage, and up the stairs, conferring with Martha, instructing Emily, gradually pulling order from chaos and getting one step ahead of every need as it arose. Mark moved easily among them, going where he was told and doing whatever was required, as—for tonight, putting aside conventional roles—each one of them did: all the servants brushing, and fetching, and drying, and stacking, and cleaning, and polishing, and rubbing, and putting out, and carrying in. When finally Mark came around the kitchen for a half-turn and realized there was no longer anything on the floor to push with his brush, he caught the cloth thrown by the scullery maid and joined her as she washed and scrubbed, attacking dust and soot and grime on the walls and floor,

  

t h e s e r va n t s

revealing tile, and paintwork, and wood. Sometimes Mr. Maynard worked beside him, sometimes Mrs. Wallis, sometimes Emily. In the center, Martha whirled and bent, her face now rosy and whole again, and the range sang and warmed and cooked. The sounds of bells came no longer as interruptions but as punctuation, vertebrae along the backbone of the day, and though the flapping noise of wings grew louder and louder, it came to sound like breaths drawn in and let out, increasingly strong and in time with the rhythm of life that underlay it all. Within only a few hours, the kitchen was back to the way Mark had first seen it on his initial clandestine trip to these parts.

And then?

They didn’t stop when order had been restored, when the kitchen and stores and passageways and servants’ parlor were once again clean. That was not enough. This was only the beginning. Now that rails had been laid again, everything running as it should, they could go faster still. Now the machine could truly come into its own. The walls went from black to brown to cream. The floor gleamed. The air became sharp and clear and sweet. All of the sounds within the servants’ quarters began to meld into one, like the heartbeat of a giant engine. Faster and faster they all went, blurring up and down the corridor, in and out of rooms, bending, reaching, putting back, moving so quickly that at times it seemed there must be ten of them down there, or fifteen. Cooking, cleaning, preparing, clearing up. Fulfilling tasks that were often the same, sometimes different, that

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h changed with the seasons, with the times, with life as it was being lived. No longer did the light seem hot and curdled, or even gray. Cream became white, and everything shone as if from a sun within. The light became so bright, in fact, that at times Mark had to shield his eyes, and even became unsure of what he was seeing—

It could not be that at one point the house was no longer there, for example, and that Mark found himself instead upon a gentle, wooded slope leading down to a low cliff where the promenade should have been; nor that he could for a moment hear the rumble of vast bombers as they trundled overhead, the thudding booms as they unloaded their contents on nearby streets. He could not have been able to hear, either, the laugh and shout of working men as they pulled boats full of fish up onto a pebbled beach, toward a small village of narrow and twisted streets; nor the distant echo of an orchestra, heels tea-dancing on a wooden floor far over the sea—or been able to glimpse a high, curved tower of glass and steel, pouring gracefully up into the sky from the place where the West Pier had once met the land, and from which tiny silver aircraft, swift and silent and studded with blue lights, now sped overhead bound for the day to Europe or Australia or even farther afield. Nor, certainly, could he have stood there knowing that somewhere in the world was a woman who shared a house with him and their two red-haired children; nor should he have been able to recall the raucous laughter of a woman then twenty years of age, the memory of which had been enough to haunt the nights and dreams of a man living alone in America, doing a job he had grown to hate.

  

t h e s e r va n t s

All these came together and at once, undivided by years, and it seemed to Mark in the end that he ran somewhere with no walls or ceilings, no floors or limits, surrounded by the reassuring swish of uniforms and measured fall of feet as people of dedication hurried past him, cutting corners and making time as they moved to do what needed to be done. They were not free as we are free now, and their way of life was not their choice, but nonetheless they followed it as best they could. They lived. They earned the space they took up. Mark ran with Emily, ferrying trays up and down the passageways; he checked bottles in the pantry with Mr. Maynard; he hefted boxes of butter and lamb chops for Mrs. Wallis; he washed and scrubbed with a girl dressed in gray, whose name he was never told, and who never thought to tell him, because nobody usually wanted to know. He did all of these things one after another, and at once; then did other things, and then started again. Even when everything was clean and every summons anticipated and nothing was out of place nor a single mote of dust to be found—still they ran and danced around each other, all in the service of the same thing, and Mark danced and ran with them, his feet beating the same ever-increasing rhythm, until . . . Suddenly everything went dark.

He was so surprised that he slipped and crashed into a wall. When he hauled himself to his feet, head ringing from the collision, he realized he was alone in a dark corridor and everything was gone and the world was still. Well, not gone, and not quite still.

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h It was all here, but as it had been on his very first visit. Empty, forgotten, quiet but for the sound of a lone pigeon around the corner, gray light seeping through broken panes of glass at the end. The dust of ages hung in the air, and broken tiles were underfoot once more.

It was that way, but also it was not.

It all still moved, like a vast bell that had been struck hours or many years before—whose sound had faded below the threshold of audibility but which still vibrated to the touch. The voices were still there, it was just you couldn’t quite hear them. People still moved busily around him, only they could not be seen. The engine was running once more. It would not stop again now.

Mark locked the big door behind him as he left the servants’ quarters, and crept into the old lady’s room. She sat in her chair, asleep, but there was a cup of tea waiting for him on the table. It was cold. On this occasion, the world outside had moved forward too. Or perhaps it was as if he’d been thrown off a carousel, and it might turn out to be yesterday, or tomorrow, or anywhere in between. It probably didn’t matter which of these, if any, was the case. He drank the tea anyway, and then went outside. It was far past the middle of the night, and Brighton was empty. There was no one in the square, no cars on the road, no one strolling up or down the promenade. Mark walked down to the seafront and stood by the covered bench, watching as dawn came slowly up over the sea. He felt both surrounded and full, as if he was the ocean and its only fish; as though he

  

t h e s e r va n t s

were all the people who had ever walked the seafront, and the paving stones beneath their feet. He found it hard to perceive the limits between himself and other things, between now and then, between yes and no.

He would never regain this feeling for the rest of his life, but just for a moment, none of these distinctions, or any others, meant anything.

Finally, he realized that someone was walking a dog down by the ocean now, that the sounds of traffic had begun, and that high up in the sky he could see a vapor trail. Also that he was so tired he could barely stand, and getting cold, and that he needed to go home. The house was silent when he let himself in. He went straight up to his mother’s floor.

Her sitting room looked like a tableau in a museum. Her cushions on the sofa, a blanket on the chair, an open magazine. For a moment, he thought he sensed a person moving behind him, maybe more than one, but when he turned, there was no one there.

He went into her bedroom. His mother lay motionless, eyes closed, a straight line down the middle of the bed. Her hair was spread out over the pillow, her face pointed straight up to the sky.

David was asleep, crashed out in the chair by the side of her bed. He looked younger than Mark had when he’d looked at himself in the mirror that morning.

Mark went back out into the sitting room and pulled one

  

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h of the other chairs through. As he sat in it, David woke up. He looked at Mark, but did not say anything. Then they both sat and waited, to see if Mark’s mother would breathe again. It was both a short wait, and a long one—and Mark knew they did not watch alone.

Eventually, and all at once, she opened her eyes.

  

twenty-four

Two weeks later, in the middle of the afternoon, Mark sat as his father walked away from The Meeting Place, toward the car he had parked on the seafront. He waved back when his father waved, and then waited until the red car had pulled away into the traffic and disappeared up the road. He remained at the table for a while afterward, watching opportunistic seagulls swooping down to steal pieces of people’s food, before picking up his board off one of the other chairs and setting off along the promenade.

He skated along at a slow, easy speed, past a few stalls selling secondhand books, T-shirts, and photographs of the West Pier as it used to be. Past the wading pool and children’s playground, still home only to defensive huddles of tired toddler-wranglers, sipping cups of coffee and listlessly supervising their progeny as they built defective sandcastles and slid cautiously down slides.

Past, also, the skateboarding area, but though he looped around it for a while, in big, slow arcs, he did not stop. He didn’t feel any strong urge to join the other kids flying and m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h falling there, though he did watch their feet for tips. On the way out onto the next section, he flipped the board beneath him, just once. He didn’t need a ramp to do this anymore, and found it hard to remember why he’d once found it difficult. Sometimes things do change, and that’s okay. You go from one place to another, become different from what you were. Sometimes things stopping did make sense. Ends meant new beginnings.

And he was
good
with his feet, after all.

“I know you said you have to make up for lost time,” said a voice, sounding scandalized, “but . . .
both
of them?”

Mark smiled to himself. He was standing a little way along from The Witch Ball, in the Lanes, killing time by looking at a window full of hats. The voice carried on in this vein as it got closer, but Mark didn’t think David actually sounded very upset.

He turned to see his stepfather and his mother heading toward him. David was carrying a wrapped picture under each arm. Mark’s mother still walked far more slowly than she used to, but she seemed to be getting a little better every day. David said that within a couple more weeks, a month at the most, she’d be able to walk all the way here from their house, instead of just back. Mark believed him. She was like that.

“Hey,” she said. “How was your day?”