‘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.
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