The Servants Read Online Free PDF Page A

He didn’t want to stay in the house. David said something to him in passing, but Mark didn’t listen, instead yanking the front door open and running outside, this time not caring how much noise the door made as it slammed behind him. He started quickly down the steps, but they were wet, and he was moving too fast.
    On the second one down, he slipped, his foot sliding off
    and jarring down onto the third. He tried to keep himself upright, but his other foot was soon slipping too, and the next thing he knew he was tumbling sideways to land flat on his face, sprawled across a puddle on the sidewalk. The wind was knocked out of him, all at once, and with it went his anger. It was replaced with something smaller and more painful. Something like misery. He had fallen down like this several times every day for weeks, but that had been different. That was just a matter of not being able to keep his balance on the board.
     
    m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h This time it felt as if he’d been shoved.
    “Oh dear,” said a voice.
    Mark looked up to see that an old woman was standing a few feet away on the sidewalk. The old woman, in fact: the one from the basement apartment. She was bundled up in a black coat, woolly and thick, and was holding a little black umbrella.
    She was looking down at him. “Horrible day,” she said. Then: “Are you hungry?”
     
    four
    While they waited for the old lady’s kettle to boil—it didn’t plug into the wall but sat on the stove—she opened the narrow door at the far end of her room. Beyond it lay a minuscule bathroom. The lady came back holding a towel. It was pale yellow and ragged around the edges but very soft, and Mark used it to dry his hands and face. Then he sat in one of the two chairs and looked around the room as the woman made two cups of tea. He felt odd being in here, but when he’d been lying there on the sidewalk at the old lady’s feet with the rain coming down, he hadn’t known what else to do. He couldn’t go back inside the house, because she’d seen him storming out, and also because he just didn’t want to. He couldn’t go down to the seafront—he’d get soaked.
    There wasn’t anywhere else to go. So he’d got to his feet and shrugged. The old woman held up a small brown paper bag.
    “I can never finish one all by myself,” she said. “Why don’t you come down and share it with me?”
    m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h As she poured water into the teapot, Mark realized he could still detect the odor 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 oldfashioned chrome clock on the bedside table gleamed as if it had been polished that morning. The tiny stove—which only had one burner, 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-gray. 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