Beneath the Sideboard

I have never believed in the supernatural. Things which go bump in the night are usually a pipe that wants seeing to, and this conviction has served me well through thirty-one years. I saw no reason to abandon it merely because my new valet appeared to be from a parallel dimension.

The trouble began, as trouble so often does, with Aunt Honoria.

Aunt Honoria is one of those large, purposeful women who give the impression of having been assembled from raw materials intended for a slightly larger project. She occupies space the way the British Empire once occupied continents — with a cheerful certainty that the territory was simply waiting to be claimed. She arrived at my flat in Clerkenwell on a Tuesday with the news that she had accepted, on my behalf, an invitation to dine with the Farthingale-Thwaites of Belgravia, whose daughter Clementine she had identified as a suitable match.

“You will attend on Thursday,” she said, in much the same tone Napoleon might have used when issuing orders regarding Moscow.

“Right-ho,” I said, because the English language contains no adequate defense against an aunt in full sail.

“Clementine is a perfectly charming girl. Her father has something to do with municipal bonds. Her mother is Elspeth Rigby-Ware’s second cousin. The family has a house in Suffolk.”

None of these facts bore directly on the question of whether I wished to marry the girl, but Aunt Honoria has never considered the wishes of the prospective bridegroom to be a relevant variable. To her, a nephew is a problem requiring a solution, and the solution is invariably a young woman with a good family, sound teeth, and a house in the country.

“I shall attend with bells on,” I said.

“You will attend with a decent suit on. That brown thing you wore to the Hendersons’ was a disgrace.”

It was at this point that I realized I was between valets. Grimmett had given notice the previous week — something about the hours, or possibly the wages, or conceivably the incident with the fire extinguisher, I forget which — and I had telephoned the agency with a request for a replacement. The agency had said they would send someone suitable.

What the agency sent was Pallwick.

He arrived on Wednesday morning, a tall, thin man with the kind of face that seemed to exist at a slight angle to the rest of reality. Not wrong, exactly — eyes nose mouth the standard configuration — but arranged with a quality that suggested they had been positioned by someone working from excellent photographs rather than direct observation. His suit was dark and fit him with a precision that bordered on the editorial.

“Pallwick, sir,” he said. “From the agency.”

“Ah. Good. Excellent. You come well recommended?”

“The agency indicated satisfaction, sir.”

There was a smell about him — like wet stone after rain, like the air that comes up from underground stations late at night. I attributed this to the damp weather and thought no more of it.

“Right, then. The situation is this, Pallwick. I am dining on Thursday with some people called Farthingale-Thwaite, at my aunt’s insistence, and the aunt in question is not a woman who accepts a refusal. I shall need to be turned out appropriately.”

“Very good, sir. Might I inquire as to the nature of the aunt?”

No valet had ever asked me this before. It was both impertinent and extraordinarily perceptive, in the way that a doctor asking after one’s symptoms is technically intrusive but practically essential.

“Large,” I said. “Determined. Convinced that I should marry. Once reduced a head waiter to tears at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand over the temperature of a sole.”

“I see, sir. And the young lady?”

“Haven’t met her. Clementine Something-Thwaite. Probably ghastly. They usually are, the ones Aunt Honoria picks out. She selects for women capable of running a small government, which is not a quality that makes for pleasant conversation over the soup.”

“Indeed, sir. I shall lay out the evening clothes.”

He drifted — I say drifted, because “walked” implies a certain engagement with the floor that Pallwick seemed to consider optional — into the bedroom, and I settled in with the evening paper.

The Farthingale-Thwaite dinner was worse than I had anticipated, and I had anticipated something on the order of the retreat from Stalingrad.

Clementine Farthingale-Thwaite was not ghastly. She was small and dark-haired and had the kind of fierce, amused eyes that suggested she found the entire proceeding as absurd as I did but was considerably better at hiding it. Under other circumstances, I might have found this appealing. Under these — seated between her mother, who kept referring to me as “Honoria’s nephew, the one who hasn’t done anything yet,” and a retired colonel who wanted to discuss drainage — I found it merely another source of anxiety.

“And what do you do, Mr. Dovetail?” Mrs. Farthingale-Thwaite inquired, with the air of a woman who already knew the answer and was asking only to confirm the worst.

“Do?”

“Professionally.”

“Ah. Well. I manage.”

“Manage what?”

“Quite. That’s rather the question, isn’t it.”

The colonel launched into sewer capacity in the borough of Kensington, and I was briefly saved. But the real trouble was the cat.

The Farthingale-Thwaites kept a large ginger cat named Admiral, which had positioned itself on the sideboard in the dining room with the air of a judge surveying his courtroom. Halfway through the fish course, Admiral began to stare at something beneath the sideboard with an intensity that suggested whatever was under there owed the cat money.

I noticed this because I was looking for anywhere to rest my eyes that was not Mrs. Farthingale-Thwaite. The cat was staring downward with its entire body rigid, tail inflated to roughly the diameter of a tennis racket, making a sound somewhere between a growl and a kettle coming to the boil.

“Admiral seems agitated,” I observed.

“He’s been like that all week,” Clementine said. “Something under the floorboards, we think. Rats, probably.”

At this point something moved beneath the sideboard. A shadow detached itself from the darker shadows under the furniture and slid along the baseboard with a fluidity somewhat above the pay grade of your average rat. It was the size of a small dog and the approximate shape of a thing that has not yet decided what shape it intends to be. It smelled of the Underground — not the trains, but the tunnels themselves, the spaces between stations where the maps go blank.

The cat launched itself off the sideboard with a yowl that caused Mrs. Farthingale-Thwaite to drop her fork and the colonel to spill his burgundy.

“Rats!” said Mrs. Farthingale-Thwaite.

“Drainage,” said the colonel, darkly.

Clementine caught my eye. She had seen it too — the shadow, the movement, the quality of wrongness. Or perhaps she’d simply seen a cat behaving like a cat and a young man behaving like a man who has drunk slightly too much of his host’s burgundy. Her expression did not change, except for a very slight raising of one eyebrow that communicated a depth of commentary lesser faces would have required a paragraph to achieve.

The evening ended shortly after Admiral knocked over the gravy boat in what appeared to be a flanking maneuver. The shadow under the sideboard retreated — or did not retreat, since shadows cannot retreat, since there was no shadow, since the entire thing was the burgundy — and Mr. Farthingale-Thwaite, who had said almost nothing all evening, shook my hand with the grip of a man who has resigned himself to the probability that his daughter will marry someone, and that the someone might as well be me as any other inadequate specimen.

Aunt Honoria cornered me in the hallway with the look of a chess player who has maneuvered her opponent’s king into a position from which there are technically several legal moves, all catastrophic.

“You will call on the family tomorrow afternoon,” she said.

“Right-ho.”

“You were adequate tonight, Freddie. Not good. Adequate. The fish fork incident was regrettable.”

“I don’t recall a fish fork incident.”

“Precisely. You used the wrong fork. You didn’t even notice. Clementine noticed. She found it endearing, which tells me either that the girl has poor standards or that she genuinely likes you, and I choose to believe the latter because the alternative is too depressing to contemplate.”

“Right-ho,” I said.

“Pallwick,” I said, upon returning to the flat, “there was a thing under the sideboard at the Farthingale-Thwaites’.”

“Sir?”

“A shadow. A moving shadow. With dimensions.”

“I see, sir.”

“You don’t seem surprised.”

Pallwick was laying out my morning clothes with the precision of a man defusing a bomb. “I would not wish to speculate beyond my area of competence, sir.”

“Your area of competence being—?”

“The care and maintenance of your wardrobe, sir. And related matters.”

“What related matters?”

There was a pause, during which Pallwick aligned my cufflinks on the dresser with a geometric exactitude that would have impressed Euclid. “There are, sir, certain elements of London that exist below the customary threshold of notice. They keep to the gaps. It is only when the gaps are disturbed — by renovation, or by the attentions of an unusually perceptive cat — that they make themselves apparent.”

I considered this. “Are you telling me there is a dimension beneath the Farthingale-Thwaites’ sideboard?”

“Not beneath the sideboard specifically, sir. The sideboard merely happens to be positioned above one of the thinner points. London is, if you will permit the metaphor, somewhat porous.”

“Porous.”

“Like good cheese, sir.”

I sat down. I stood up. I sat down again. “And you know this because?”

“I am from there, sir.”

My reaction was not the wild-eyed consternation that novels might lead one to expect. I had noticed the smell — the wet-stone, deep-tunnel smell that clung to Pallwick like an aftershave marketed exclusively to spelunkers. And there had been the matter of his slightly angled face, and the way he moved through rooms as though negotiating a different geometry.

“From there,” I said.

“From Below, sir. I entered service Above some years ago. The agency operates in both directions.”

“The agency.”

“Yes, sir. It is considered,” he added, with a delicacy that would have commanded the admiration of Talleyrand, “a rather good placement.”

“Pallwick, are you telling me that there is an employment agency that supplies valets to both regular London and some kind of underground shadow London, and that I, through no fault of my own, have ended up with one from the shadow department?”

“The distinction is not quite so stark, sir. We prefer the term ‘adjacent.’”

“Adjacent.”

“The placement is otherwise identical, sir. I press trousers. I mix restoratives. I manage the aunt.”

I seized on this. “Can you manage the aunt?”

“I have studied the aunt, sir. She presents no difficulties that cannot be addressed through conventional means.”

“And the thing under the sideboard? Can you manage that?”

“That, sir, is a somewhat more complex matter.”

The complex matter became considerably more complex over the following forty-eight hours.

First: Aunt Honoria telephoned to inform me that Clementine had expressed a favorable impression and that I would be escorting her to the Pembrokes’ garden party on Saturday.

Second: the thing under the sideboard — which Pallwick identified, with the air of a man diagnosing a routine plumbing issue, as a Borrowing Shade from the Under-Borough of Floorswick — had taken up residence and was expanding. Each night it grew by approximately the area of a dinner plate, which is not a unit of measurement I had ever expected to apply to a supernatural phenomenon, but there it was.

Third, and most inconveniently: the Under-Borough of Floorswick had dispatched a representative to negotiate the Borrowing Shade’s return, and this representative — a small, mushroom-colored woman named Mrs. Guttering — had presented herself at my flat under the impression that I was the local Surface Warden.

“I am not,” I said, “the local Surface Warden.”

“Your man is from Below,” Mrs. Guttering said. She was sitting in my armchair drinking my sherry with the authority of a woman who has navigated bureaucracies considerably stranger than mine. “That makes you a threshold household. Threshold households have responsibilities.”

“I have quite enough responsibilities,” I said. “There is an aunt. There is a garden party. There is a girl I am apparently courting despite having exchanged fewer than twelve words with her, eight of which were about a cat.”

“The cat is relevant,” Mrs. Guttering said.

“The cat is not relevant. The cat is a cat.”

“The cat can see the cracks. Animals often can. Your Admiral—”

“He’s not my Admiral. He belongs to the Farthingale-Thwaites.”

“Your Admiral,” Mrs. Guttering continued, with the serene indifference to correction that I normally associate with aunts, “has been guarding the thin point under the sideboard for the better part of a week. This is commendable but unsustainable. Cats require sleep. When the cat sleeps, the Shade expands. If the Shade expands sufficiently, the thin point becomes a passage, and if the passage opens fully, you will have rather more of Floorswick in your Farthingale-Thwaites’ dining room than anyone would consider desirable.”

“What does Floorswick look like?”

“Damp,” she said. “And rather a lot of mushrooms. Some of them talk, but only in the sense that they convey mood. You wouldn’t call it conversation. More of an ongoing commentary.”

“Mushrooms,” I said. “Commentating mushrooms.”

“The Under-Boroughs are not quite what you’d expect, Mr. Dovetail. They exist in the spaces between. Like the pause between heartbeats, if the pause had plumbing and a local council. We’ve been there since the Great Fire — when London Above burned, quite a lot of it fell through. We’re very organized. There’s a pension scheme.”

I reached for the sherry.

Pallwick materialized — I use the word advisedly — at my elbow with a fresh sherry. “Mrs. Guttering is correct, sir. The situation requires attention.”

“Whose attention?”

“Ideally, sir, mine. With your permission, I would call upon the Farthingale-Thwaite residence this evening and attend to the thin point. The procedure is straightforward. However—”

“However?”

“It would be helpful, sir, if the household were unoccupied at the time. The procedure involves a degree of activity that might be difficult to explain in domestic terms.”

“You want me,” I said, “to invite the Farthingale-Thwaites out for the evening.”

“If it would not be too much trouble, sir.”

“The entire family.”

“And the cat, sir, if possible. The cat’s presence during the procedure would be counterproductive.”

“You want me to invite the Farthingale-Thwaites and their cat to the theatre.”

“It need not be the theatre, sir.”

“What else does one invite people and a cat to?”

“I leave the social particulars to you, sir. It is not my area.”

This was rather rich coming from a man whose area apparently included interdimensional plumbing, but I let it pass.

I telephoned Aunt Honoria. I volunteered — volunteered — to take Clementine and her parents to the theatre. The silence on the other end of the line lasted approximately four seconds before erupting into a cascade of approval covering topics from my choice of venue to wedding locations to her considered opinion on the naming of children.

“You will wear the dark blue,” she said.

“Right-ho.”

“And the gold cufflinks.”

“Right-ho.”

“And Freddie — don’t talk about yourself. Ask her questions. Listen. Women like listening.”

“Women like listening?”

“Women like men who listen, you imbecile.”

The cat was a separate problem. Clementine solved it herself by mentioning that Admiral had become so fixated on the sideboard that she was considering the vet. I suggested she bring him round to my flat instead — fresh surroundings, change of scene, do the old boy good. She agreed. I did not mention that my flat contained a man from a parallel dimension preparing implements of uncertain provenance for an evening of subterranean maintenance.

Pallwick handled the theatre tickets. He produced them from somewhere — the faint smell of wet stone clinging to the envelope discouraged further inquiry — and they were excellent seats, third row center, for a production of something at the Old Vic. The programme appeared to be printed on paper that was not quite paper, in an ink that was not quite ink, but the seats were real enough, and if one or two of the actors cast shadows that didn’t quite match their movements, well, theatre is all about shadows.

I collected the Farthingale-Thwaites at seven. Clementine was wearing a green dress that suggested she had not entirely abandoned the possibility that the evening might be enjoyable. Her parents emerged like hostages who have chosen to appreciate the catering. Admiral had been deposited at my flat an hour earlier, where Pallwick had installed him in the kitchen with a saucer of cream and an authority the cat found, if not pleasant, at least non-negotiable.

Clementine, freed from the surveillance of her mother’s dining table, turned out to be genuinely funny — not witty in the performed, quotation-ready way, but funny in the way of someone who has noticed that the world is ridiculous and has decided to enjoy it rather than fix it. During the interval she told me about Admiral’s campaign against the sideboard, and I listened, partly because Aunt Honoria had instructed me to listen and partly because something in her account bothered me.

“He’s been absolutely impossible,” she said. “Sits there all night. Won’t eat. Won’t sleep. Just stares at the baseboard and growls.”

“Cats are peculiar animals,” I said, with what I hoped was the easy authority of a man who has never had cause to agree with a cat about anything.

“It’s not the cat that’s peculiar. It’s the baseboard. There’s a crack in it that wasn’t there last month, and sometimes, when the light is right — or wrong, I suppose — you can see something through it. Like looking through a keyhole into a room that’s bigger than the room it’s in.”

She said this the way one might mention a draft or a sticky window. Most people, confronted with evidence of a parallel dimension in their dining room, would exhibit some degree of agitation. Clementine mentioned it the way she might mention an interesting cloud formation.

I changed the subject to the play, which was about a family doing things to each other, and tried not to think about Pallwick underneath the Farthingale-Thwaites’ dining room with implements I had glimpsed only briefly and had no wish to see again.

Mrs. Farthingale-Thwaite fell asleep during the third act. Mr. Farthingale-Thwaite watched the stage with the fixed attention of a man thinking about municipal bonds. Clementine leaned toward me during a scene in which two characters were arguing about a house.

“There’s a draft,” she whispered.

There was. It came from beneath our seats, carrying the smell of stone and deep water and earth that has never seen the sun. It ruffled the programme in my lap and stopped.

“Old building,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Full of gaps.”

We watched the rest of the play in a silence that was either companionable or conspiratorial.

We returned to find the house smelling of beeswax and old money, with no detectable trace of mushrooms or damp subterranean dimensions.

Clementine went immediately to the dining room. I followed. She crouched beside the sideboard and ran her finger along the baseboard where the crack had been.

The crack was gone. The wood was smooth, seamless, as though it had never been breached.

Her face did something complicated — relief and disappointment and something harder to name.

“Fixed,” she said.

“Must have been the damp,” I said. “Expanding, contracting, that sort of thing.”

She looked at me. Her eyes had that fierce quality again, and I realized it was not amusement at all — it was recognition. She was looking at me the way Admiral looked at the baseboard.

“Yes,” she said. “That sort of thing.”

We collected Admiral from my flat. The cat had spent the evening in the exact center of my kitchen floor, equidistant from all baseboards. Pallwick reported that Admiral had refused the cream, refused the sardines, and refused to acknowledge Pallwick’s existence, but had otherwise been a model guest.

The cat permitted himself to be placed in his carrier with the dignity of a deposed monarch entering exile. He sniffed the air once, deeply, and turned to stare at the baseboard beside my radiator with an expression that said, quite clearly, I know what you have here. Pallwick did not meet my eye.

Aunt Honoria declared the courtship a triumph. The Pembrokes’ garden party had been a success — I remember very little of it beyond a strong punch, a vicar with opinions about hedgerows, and a moment when Clementine touched my arm and pointed at a crack in the garden wall that contained, briefly and impossibly, a small blue light — and I was to call again on Tuesday.

“The thin point has been sealed, sir. Mrs. Guttering has been informed. The Borrowing Shade has been returned to the Under-Borough of Floorswick, where it will be the subject of an inquiry regarding unauthorized expansion. I have taken the liberty of submitting the necessary paperwork on your behalf.”

“Paperwork?”

“As Surface Warden, sir. The position, once conferred, is not easily relinquished. I took the liberty of accepting it in your name. The duties are largely ceremonial.”

“Largely.”

“Almost entirely, sir. Occasional inspections. A small amount of correspondence. Nothing that would interfere with your social calendar.”

I stared at him. “You have made me the warden of a section of underground London without my knowledge or consent.”

“The alternative, sir, was a delegation from the Under-Borough. They would have arrived during the Pembrokes’ garden party. I felt this would have been difficult to explain to your aunt.”

He had me there. The image of Mrs. Guttering emerging from the Pembrokes’ garden wall and demanding to speak with the Surface Warden while Aunt Honoria looked on was sufficiently horrifying to make the wardenship seem a minor inconvenience.

“There is, however, one further matter, sir.”

“Oh?”

“Miss Farthingale-Thwaite, sir. She is not entirely what she appears.”

“None of us are, Pallwick.”

“No, sir. But Miss Farthingale-Thwaite is, if I may say so, rather less what she appears than most. The agency has her on file.”

I looked at him. “Your agency.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The agency that operates in both directions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re telling me that Clementine Farthingale-Thwaite is—”

“I am telling you, sir, that the agency has her on file. I would not wish to speculate beyond that.”

I thought about Admiral, who had never once growled at Clementine. Everything else near the sideboard got the full treatment — but not her. Either she was outside the range of whatever the cat was detecting, or she was so thoroughly inside it that Admiral had accepted her as part of the landscape. I kept circling back to that second possibility the way a man circles back to a sore tooth.

“Pallwick,” I said.

“Sir?”

“Is there a crack in the baseboard of this flat?”

He was adjusting a vase on the mantelpiece by approximately one-eighth of an inch.

“There is always a crack somewhere, sir.”

“I see.”

“Will there be anything else, sir?”

I looked at the baseboard. There was, now that I examined it, a hairline fracture running along the join between wall and floor, no wider than a thumbnail. Through it, if one knelt down and pressed one’s eye to the gap — which I had no intention of doing — one might see a glimmer. A movement. Something that smelled of wet stone and old railways.

“Have that seen to, would you?” I said.

“Very good, sir,” said Pallwick.

He did not have it seen to. I did not ask again.

Admiral arrived the following week — delivered by Clementine, who said “He likes you,” which was patently untrue; the cat regarded me with the weary tolerance of a customs official processing a passport he suspects is forged. He positioned himself beside the baseboard, settled his chin on his paws, and began his watch.

Pallwick brought him a saucer of cream. Admiral ignored it. Pallwick adjusted the saucer by one-eighth of an inch and withdrew.

Through the crack, if one pressed one’s ear to it — which I had no intention of doing — one could hear something that might have been mushrooms.