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THE SERVANTS
M. M. Smith
For M.R.S.
And in memory of the W.P.
Table of Contents
If you live long enough, everything happens.
As she walked up the last stretch of pavement towards the house, the old lady felt cold. Not so much on the surface – her thick coat, scarf and hat were holding their own against the chill, aided by the exertion of a battle along the wintry seafront – but inside. The older you get, the colder your bones become, as if turning slowly back to stone – readying themselves for the unexpected day or inevitable night when you'll try to move your limbs and discover they are now forever still, that there's nothing to do but wait for someone to gently close your eyes. The body accepts ageing with resignation, never having expected to last forever. The mind has different ideas, and no respect for time.
Sadly, the body almost always wins.
She paused at the top of the stairs down to her flat, and looked back towards the sea, remembering years when she had run down the pebbled shore to dive into the waves. She had not always been old, of course. Nor always a lady, either, if the truth be told. Age is an excellent camouflage, turning those who wear it into spies, sleepers deep in enemy territory. No one imagines that the person wrapped inside that pale, dry tissue paper might have sweated and yelled and run, in their day, that they might know secrets yet to be discovered in younger lives. Least of all the young themselves, who – for all their gangly verve and the raptor-like acquisitiveness of their gaze – seem to find it impossible to see much beyond the tips of their noses. Not all of them, of course, and not always. But mainly.
Eventually the old lady turned away from the sea, and started down the steps.
She let herself into her little basement home, a place where she had lived so long that it was hard sometimes to remember that it was physically separate from her. She never forgot how fortunate she was to have it, though, having seen her contemporaries (those still alive, at least) exchanging a lifetime of independence and accumulated possessions for some bare cell in an old persons' facility, surrounded by crabby strangers: stripped of everything but memories that in time came to seem more real than the world had ever been; condemned to tea that was never made quite how they liked it, enduring the consensus choice of which television channel to have on.
Yes, her flat was tiny. But it was hers.
She switched on the electric fire as soon as she was inside. She knew she was lucky, also, to feel as well as she did, that her aches and pains often faded if not exactly overnight, then during the course of a few days. Lucky, but not just lucky. You do not get to be old without learning some things, glimpsing a little of the way the world works – assuming you keep your eyes and ears open, at least, and she always had.
She understood that every life involves bargains, and exchange, and recently she had started to believe there were new things to be seen and heard.
Lately, in the last few weeks, she had found herself unsettled from time to time. Waking in the night as if disturbed by movement which had just that moment stopped. Aware of the weight of the house above her, like a dark cloud pregnant with rain. Convinced that, just below the threshold of audibility, someone had raised their voice.
Silly ideas, all of them. She hoped so, at least. Because it was hard to believe that any of them would promise good things.
The old lady removed her coat and hung it neatly on its hook on the back of the door. The key to living anywhere is to know how to live there – just ask any snail. She took from her coat pocket a brown paper bag, containing the snack she habitually took at this time in the late afternoon. Rhythm, order, ritual. The old and the very young understand the importance of these things. It's only in the intervening years that people think they can escape life's structures, not realizing how this apparent freedom traps them in a permanent here