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‘I can never finish one all by myself,’ she said. ‘Why don't you come down and share it with me?’
As she poured water into the teapot, Mark realized he could still detect the odour he'd picked up in the passageway after helping the lady fix her light. It seemed hard to believe it was coming from in here, though. Everything was spotlessly tidy. The top of the little table, and the arms of the chair he sat in, were not home to a single speck of dust. The bed was so tightly made that the blanket was utterly flat. The old-fashioned chrome clock on the bedside table gleamed as if had been polished that morning. The tiny stove – which only had one ring, and a grill about a foot wide – was obviously prehistoric, but still looked as if it had been recently cleaned by a high pressure hose.
He couldn't help wondering if the smell came from the old lady herself, though that wasn't a nice thought and didn't seem likely. It was a slightly damp, brown smell, and everything about her was dry and white and grey.
There was only one picture on the walls, and it was very long and thin. It was an old painting, and showed a line of familiar buildings that all looked the same.
The old lady saw him looking at it. ‘A panorama of the seafront,’ she said. ‘Painted a hundred and seventy years ago.’
Apart from the fact that the few people in the picture wore strange suits and top hats, or long skirts that bulged out at the back, very little about the view had changed. Mark felt obscurely annoyed at Brighton for being that way. In London, things changed all the time. They went on forever, but they changed. Here things stopped, but stayed the same.
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Oh, quite some time,’ she said. ‘But no, I don't remember it that way’
She put a cup of tea down next to him. It didn't look like any cup of tea he'd seen before. It was dark brown, almost red. ‘There.’
‘Is that … a special kind of tea?’
‘No,’ she said, lowering herself slowly into the other chair. ‘It's just strong. Most people make their tea far too weak, and what's the point in that? If you want a cup of tea, have a cup of tea. That's what I say’
Next to the tea she put down a plate on which lay the contents of the brown paper bag. This was a cake, but of a kind with which Mark was unfamiliar, though he thought he might have seen things like it for sale at The Meeting Place. The cake had been cut neatly in half. Mark picked up one part and bit into it cautiously. It was hard and tasted of flour and was studded with little raisins. It was not consistent with his idea of a good time.
‘Very nice,’ he said, putting it back down.
‘Keep at it,’ she said. ‘Not everything tastes good in the first bite.’
This sounded uncomfortably like the lecture David had been giving him upstairs, before he ran out, and Mark sat back in his chair.
‘Oh dear,’ the old lady said. ‘Did I say something wrong?’
They remained like that for a while. Mark picked up the cake again, and took another bite. It still tasted odd, as if it came from a time when people ate things because they had to eat, not because they expected to get much pleasure from it. The War, perhaps, when Mark gathered things in general had been somewhat substandard. He liked the tea strong, though, and the third and fourth bites of the cake – by which time he'd lowered his expectations – were not too bad. The raisins were okay, at least.
‘Why were you running?’ the old lady asked, out of the silence.
He shrugged. He didn't know what to say, and he didn't face questions like this very often. If another kid your own age asked then you'd just say the person who'd annoyed you was an arsehole and go kick a football and by the time that was over you wouldn't be so mad. Grown-ups never made that kind of enquiry, and it seemed unlikely the old lady would much fancy knocking a football around. ‘I just wanted to get out of there.’
‘Trouble upstairs?’
‘I suppose so.’
The old lady nodded. ‘I hear coughing, sometimes.’
‘My mother,’ Mark said, defensively. ‘She's not too well at the moment. She's okay, though.’
‘And your father?’
‘He's not my father.’
The old lady paused, her own portion of the rock cake – that's what it was called, apparently – halfway to her mouth. ‘Oh. I understood he was married to your mother.’
‘Well, yes, he is.’
She cocked her head slightly on one side. ‘So …’
‘That doesn't make him my dad. I have a dad already. He lives in London.’
‘I went to London once,’ she said. ‘Didn't like it much. Too many people. Couldn't tell who anyone was.’
‘It's better than here. Stuff happens. You can go to places.’
Mark had spoken far more sharply than he'd intended, but she didn't seem to notice.
‘I'm sure you're right,’ she said.
She went to the counter and poured a little more water into the teapot. She swirled the pot around, slowly, looking up through the window. The lace curtains prevented you from being able to see much, but you could tell it was still raining hard. ‘How long have they been married?’
‘Four months. They did it really quickly. I think he made her do it fast in case she realized what an idiot he is and changed her mind.’
‘Is he an idiot?’
‘Yes. He really is. He's really annoying, too. He's always trying to make me do things, and getting in the way. He doesn't know anything about us. He doesn't understand.’
The old lady just kept swirling the teapot around. The room was warm now, almost stuffy. The clock on the bedside table ticked loudly. Each tick seemed to come more slowly than the last tock, and Mark suddenly felt very homesick. He didn't want to be here, in this tiny flat, in this house, in this town. He wanted to be back in London, in his old room, watching television or playing a video game and knowing that his mother and real father were downstairs. Even if once in a while voices had been raised, it was home. It had been real. This was not. This was a place where you just marked time.
When was he going back to school? When was he going to see his friends again? When was he going to see his dad?
He needed to know the answer to these questions, but every time the clock ticked it seemed to get louder, as if each tock was a bar in the cage that held him here. He grabbed the remaining chunk of his portion of the cake and put it all in his mouth at once, chewing it quickly. It was dry and leached all of the moisture out of his mouth, but once he'd swallowed it, he could go. It didn't matter where. There were covered benches down on the promenade, like the one he'd dreamed about the night before. He could sit sheltered in one of those, watch it rain on the ocean. How pointless was that, by the way – raining on the ocean? Why did it even bother? He was feeling miserable now, and everything seemed stupid. He just wanted to go.
But when he glanced up, ready to start making his excuses, he saw the old lady was looking at him with a curious expression on her face – partly smiling, but also serious, as if making an assessment.
She cocked her head on one side. ‘How would you like to see something?’ she said.
‘Like what?’
‘Just … something you might find interesting.’
She went to a small drawer in the counter, took an object out and held it up to show him. It was a large key.
He frowned. ‘What's that for?’
‘I'll show you,’ she said. ‘It's all right – you can bring your tea.’
Mark followed the old lady out into the corridor. He assumed she was going to go left, into the narrow passageway that led to the outer door, that perhaps there was something stored in a cupboard there. He had a horrible suspicion she was going to give him something. Old people did that, sometimes, thinking they were being nice but in fact making you accept something that you didn't understand or value and didn't know what to do with.
Instead she turned right and walked to the big, solid door. She fitted the key into its lock and turned it with an apparent effort. It made a loud, hollow sound, like a single horse's hoof landing on the road. She turned the knob and pushed, and the door opened away from her, slowly receding, without any sound at all.
There was darkness on the other side, the faintest hint of a very pale, grey glow in one corner.
‘Ready?’ she said.
She reached into the gloom and flicked a switch on the wall, and suddenly a couple of dim lights came on beyond, hanging from the ceiling of whatever lay on the other side of the door.
Mark's mouth dropped open slowly.
Chapter 5 (#uc3b41b36-a3c4-5772-80bd-0ac0561eceba)
HE FOLLOWED THE old lady as she stepped through the threshold and into the corridor beyond. It was the same width as the one they'd entered from, and ran towards the back of the building. Where the first corridor had been merely grimy, however, the walls here were almost brown. Mark looked more closely and saw that the colour was mottled, as if caused by years and years of smoke, under a thick layer of dust.
There were two openings on the right of the corridor. The first was a narrow door, which was shut. The second, a couple of yards further on, was the entrance to a short side corridor. There was a door on the left of this, and another opening at the end.
Past this, the main corridor ran for a few more yards and then took a sharp right turn. He couldn't see what happened after that, but it was from down there that the soft grey light was coming.
‘What is this?’
‘What do you think?’
Mark shook his head. He couldn't imagine what this space might have been. It looked a little like a floor of the house above, but with much lower ceilings and no windows and no fancy bits anywhere. It felt ancient, almost like a cave – but because of the smooth surfaces and corners everywhere, it also felt almost modern.
‘The servants' quarters,’ the old lady said.
‘Servants?’
‘These houses were built a long time ago. Not even the last century – the one before that. They were made specially for fancy people up in London, who wanted to come and take the sea air.’
‘On holiday?’
‘Like a holiday, but it was supposed to be good for their health too. Fancy people weren't used to doing anything for themselves in those days, though, and so they brought their servants along with them.’
‘What kind of servants?’
The lady opened the first door. Beyond was a dark recess, about four feet deep and three feet wide, with shelves on either side. These were empty and thick with dust and cobwebs.
‘The butler's pantry,’ she said. ‘You've heard of butlers, I assume?’
Mark's understanding of the term was largely confined to the expression ‘the butler did it’, plus he'd heard of Jeeves, but he nodded. ‘The man who opened the door to people.’
She smiled faintly. ‘That, and a good deal more. He was in charge of the world down here, for the most part, and one of his responsibilities was the house's wine, and brandy, and port.’ She closed the door again and pointed at a dark smudge just below the door handle, which extended a couple of inches either side of where the door met the frame. ‘This was sealed with wax every night, to make sure none of the other servants … helped themselves.’
She led Mark down the corridor and into the right turn. The first door on the left was open. Beyond was a tiny, windowless room, barely big enough to hold a single bed. Now it was full of old broken furniture and shadows. ‘This was where the butler slept.’
‘It's tiny.’
‘Not for a servant, I can assure you. Only one other person down here even had a room to themselves.’
She walked on past the doorway to the end. The lights from the corridor didn't shed much illumination here, and all Mark could make out was a murky and low-ceilinged space, again filled with bits of old junk.
‘The servants' parlour. They ate their meals in here, and the housemaid would sleep on the floor at night.’
‘This is where they hung out?’
‘There was no “hanging out”. They worked. I'll show you where.’
As she led Mark back to the main corridor, the old lady trailed her frail hand along the smooth surface of the right-hand wall. Where it joined the other passage, it turned in a smooth arc.
When they reached the point at the bottom where the corridor turned to the right again, Mark gasped quietly. He could see now where the light had been coming from.
The space they walked into was almost like a small, enclosed courtyard, filled with muted grey light, as if from inside a rain cloud. It was protected from the sky by a wooden roof and a large skylight, but still felt nearly as much a part of the outside as a part of the house. This, he realized, was where the smell was coming from. A couple of panes of glass in the skylight were cracked or broken, and water was dripping steadily onto the floor, onto broken tiles and pieces of wood which lay strewn all around. They smelt rotten. There were pigeon feathers on the ground, too, and quite a lot of bird crap. There was a soft cooing sound from somewhere.
‘Dreadful things,’ the old lady said. ‘Rats with wings.’
Mark barely heard her. He was turning in a slow circle. On the left of the room there were a couple more doorways, one to an area with metal grilles in the walls. At the far end of the space was another pair, but much lower, and on the right side of the room, which he assumed must be a kitchen, he saw the rusted remains of … he wasn't really sure what it was, in fact.
‘The range,’ the old lady said. ‘Where meals for the entire household were cooked. There would have been a big table here, right where we're standing, but I'm sure that was sold many years ago. Probably a dining table up in London now, or someone's desk. People stopped living this way seventy or eighty years ago. In most houses all this has been turned into a basement flat.’
Now Mark thought about it, he realized he knew this. His mother had a friend in London who lived in Notting Hill, in an apartment that was below ground level, like this. Hers was all white walls and down-lighting and big paintings with splashes of colour, however. It was hard to imagine it could ever have been something like this.
He pointed at the small room with grilles in the walls. ‘What was that?’
‘It's where the meat was stored.’
‘They had a room, just for the fridge?’
‘There were no refrigerators. The meat was hung. The grilles in the walls are so the air could circulate.’
‘Didn't the meat go off?’
‘Sometimes. The space next to it is the oven and bakery area. Then …’ She turned to indicate the two low doors at the end. ‘Storage areas. Vegetables and fruit on the left, dairy – milk, cheese – on the right.’
Mark went over and entered each area in turn, having to crouch slightly to get inside. The ceilings were curved, like a vault. There were shelves on either side of both rooms, again holding nothing but years and years of dust. They could have stored a lot once, though.
When he came back out he noticed a couple of broken wooden boxes on the other side of the kitchen space. They had wire netting across the front, and looked like very basic rabbit hutches that had fallen apart.
‘Chickens,’ the old lady said.
‘Chickens? They had chickens in the house?’
‘Of course. Fresh eggs every morning.’
Mark laughed, trying to picture a state of affairs in which it made sense to have live chickens in a place where people lived. Beyond the coops was a shallow recess in the wall, about eight feet wide and four feet deep. ‘Was that a fireplace?’
The old lady smiled. ‘No, dear. That was where the cook slept. And the scullery maid, too, unless she just bedded down in the middle of the floor.’
‘It's cold, though,’ he said, trying to picture this.
‘Of course. It's almost underground. But it would have been different when the range was alight. Then it would have been the one warm place down here. The cook was lucky, in winter. In summer … not so lucky’
Mark tried to imagine what it had been like. Two people sleeping in this area – in the kitchen, another in the other tiny room he'd seen at the end of the side corridor. Meat hanging in the space over there, a range puffing out smoke and heat, chickens clucking and walking around, the cook clattering around at the stove…
