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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The School of English

A Note on the Author

Read On

Also by Hilary Mantel

About the Publisher

The School of English

‘Lastly,’ Mr Maddox said, ‘and to conclude our tour, we come to a very special part of the house.’ He paused, to impress on her that she was going to have a treat. ‘Perhaps, Miss Marcella, it may be that in your last situation, the house did not have a panic room?’

Marcella put her hand to her mouth. ‘God help them. The family go in together, or one at a time?’

‘There is capacity for all the family,’ Mr Maddox said. ‘The need arising, which God forbid.’

‘Which God forbid,’ she repeated. The idea of group agitation … how, she wondered, does panic ignite and spread? Is it parents to children, children to parents? ‘Can the doctor do nothing for them?’ she asked. ‘There are pills to stop fear. Also they say, breathe into a paper bag. It does good in some way, I am not sure how.’

Mr Maddox – the butler – turned his eyes on her, and she knew she had made an error. Perhaps she had shown over-familiarity. Or perhaps she had mistaken his meaning; this seemed likely. ‘So it is not,’ she said tentatively, ‘a room you go in when you are frightened?’

‘It is not a mere room,’ Mr Maddox said, ‘but a facility. Follow and I will show you.’ But he turned back. ‘If you were making a joke, I heartily discourage you. I myself benefited from the care of English nursery teacher. I am joking like a native speaker. But in such exclusive postcodes as St John’s Wood, or in any leafy part of this great metropolis, it is easy to give offence.’ He patted the paunch beneath his T-shirt. (We are a modern, informal household, she had been told.) ‘Miss Marcella,’ he said, ‘come with me.’

She would never have guessed the door they passed through was a door at all. It seemed like mere wall. Once it was opened, the light came on by itself, and it showed a part of the house that was concealed except to those who were, like the butler, in the know: that was where he said he was.

‘Mr Maddox,’ she said, ‘I am to clean here?’

‘Weekly,’ he said. ‘Vacuum, air freshener, toilet clean. Even if never used.’

‘Which God forbid it should be,’ she said. She looked around her and began to understand the panic room. Mr Maddox showed her the big bottles of water and the cupboard with its supply of snack food. There was a sofa and two chairs, covered in a businesslike charcoal fabric; they looked hard and could have used some cushions. There was a lavatory with a cold block of soap, a supermarket soap inferior to that in the rest of the house. Why? she wondered. Why sink your standards of comfort? She saw how, from week to week, the green lavatory cleaner in the unflushed bowl would pool, a verdant lake deepening.

Against the far wall there was a single bed with a frame of tubular metal, made up with starched white sheets and a navy-blue blanket tucked in tight. ‘Only one to sleep?’ she asked.

‘Sleep is not envisaged,’ the butler said. ‘Within an hour, and please God within less, either the police or the security service will liberate. The bed is for a casualty.’

‘Sorry,’ Marcella said. ‘I don’t know this word.’

She had irritated Mr Maddox. ‘I thought you came here via The Lady. And good English guaranteed thereby.’

‘The Lady is not my employer,’ Marcella said. ‘It is only a means to an end.’ She stopped and wondered at the phrase: ‘a means to an end’. She said, ‘I am English-tested. In my bag here I have a certificate.’

‘I do not give a fig for your certificate,’ Mr Maddox snapped. ‘As for The Lady, I know it is not your employer. Do not trifle. I repeat: I believed that only a person of great excellence in the English language would peruse The Lady.’

‘No.’ Marcella began to feel tired. She thought she would like to stretch out on the panic room’s metal bed. She had seen worse beds, and some of them across the town, in Notting Hill. ‘The Lady is freely available to all seeking domestic work,’ she said. ‘It is only a magazine. It is not the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. It is not a manual of magic spells.’

‘Impertinence will not carry you far,’ the butler said. ‘Only by a short route to dismissal, and no employment tribunal for you, do not think it. Her Majesty’s Government in its wisdom is pleased to remove legal aid from you whingeing type of person. So once dismissed they stay dismissed. I am warning you.’

The floor of the panic room struck cold into Marcella’s feet. The salary promised was small, but she needed a roof over her head, and here was that roof: NW8, live-in, for flexible person must like dogs, with experience of specialist laundry and helpful attitude, non-smoker. At a good distance north of here, there was a room over a fried-chicken shop, where certain of her countrywomen gathered and passed The Lady hand to hand, as if they had never reached the age of the internet: they were not digital, they could not recharge, they were unable to keep a laptop in case it was filched from their very laps, or any portable device that simply added to what they had to carry; they feared street robbers. The Lady, therefore, scanned by so many eyes, became limp and grey; it became circled in red, crossed in green, starred in blue. In the room above the deep-fat fryers, a woman might conceal herself from officers, police or other types: hiding if she was wanted, hiding if she was unwanted – that is to say, dismissed. She might resort there for a night or more, if she had no alternative but the streets. Sometimes the women lay end to end, exhausted, rolled into sleeping bags or blankets, grey faces vacant in sleep; when they woke, they hardly knew their own names.

So it was with a look both humble and contrite that Marcella made her apology to Mr Maddox. ‘I only asked the meaning of a word. In future I shall buy a dictionary.’

‘Well, you are young,’ the butler conceded. ‘Perhaps you may yet learn. “Casualty” is an injured person. Gunshot wound for example.’

She could see such a person would need to lie down. ‘Who has shot them?’

‘Intruder. Kidnapper. Abductor. Robber. Outrager. Terrorist. Desperado.’

‘Peril on every side,’ Marcella murmured.

‘This is a very basic panic room,’ the butler explained. ‘A bullet will not pierce it, and the air, being filtered, is able to eliminate most chemicals and biologicals, but it is designed to accommodate only till the security men come at the touch of a button. I mean, the panic buttons,’ he instructed. ‘They are placed in all living areas.’

‘Are they red?’

‘Red? Why would they be?’

‘How shall I know them? If I do not spot them I might press them when I am dusting, at a time when there is no terrorist threat, and this can lead to The Boy Who Cried Wolf.’

The butler stared at her. As she suspected, though his English was more florid than hers, his range of allusion was less.

‘Of course they are not red,’ he said. ‘They are concealed so our employers can press them discreetly. They are in hidden places.’