by Jonathan Coe
‘Keep an eye on your mailbox over the next few weeks. There’ll always be an opening at the Yard for men of your calibre.’
The smile on PC Pilbeam’s face started to spread as the meaning of this remark sank in. Promotion … Fast-tracking through the ranks, and a move to London … This was the beginning of his ascent to greatness. He was on his way.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, turning to Lucinda.
Apparently she had.
‘I know,’ she said, her eyes shining – almost mistily – with admiration and contentment. ‘Isn’t it wonderful news? Do you want to borrow the key, so you can go and move your things?’
‘What?’
‘You heard what the constable said. That horrible man’s been locked up, so he won’t be staying in the hotel tonight. There is a spare room after all. So that solves our other problem!’
Which left PC Pilbeam with an entire, solitary, brandy-fuelled night to lie awake, staring at the ceiling in his seventh-floor room, and contemplating the unfathomable mystery, the frankly insoluble case that was Severe Miss Lucinda Givings.
George Osborne, addressing the Conservative Party conference, 6 October 2009:
‘We are all in this together.’
* * *
WHAT A WHOPPER!
1
My name is Livia and I come from Bucharest.
We have a saying in my country: Totul trebuie s aib un început. Which means: Everything must have a beginning. So I will begin my story like this.
I have been living in London for more than five years, and my job is taking the dogs of very rich people for their daily walk. Most of my clients live in Chelsea. I used to live there myself but then the rents became so high that I moved out to Wandsworth so now every day I begin by taking a bus across the river. I look out through the windows of the bus as we cross the bridge, and from that point on, every time the bus gets to another stop I can see the signs of wealth more and more clearly inscribed in the streets and feel the air itself getting heavier with the tangy scent of money.
I get off at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and then walk towards The Boltons. The houses here are big and beautiful. Well-tended gardens hide behind walls which are as smart and politely forbidding as a security guard at an exclusive nightclub. Closedcircuit cameras sprout among the ivy and the sycamore trees. My first call of the day involves stopping outside one of these walls. There is a small green door in the wall and, next to it, a discreet keypad upon which, if you possess the secret knowledge, you can enter a five-digit code which admits you to this earthly paradise. I have been coming here every day for fourteen months but I have not yet been told the code.
Instead, I have to send a text message to a Malaysian housemaid, who shortly afterwards emerges to open the door in the wall. She is accompanied by a large, bright-eyed, restless black Labrador. This is Clarissa. She at least greets me like a friend. So now I take her for her walk. If today is a busy day I will only take her as far as Brompton Cemetery. If I have plenty of time we will go all the way to Hyde Park.
Sometimes in Hyde Park I meet Jane. I can always recognize Jane, even from a distance, by the number of dogs she will have with her. Always four or five; sometimes as many as ten. If the dogs will allow her, we’ll sit at the café next to the Serpentine and drink coffee together.
Shortly after we first met, Jane told me her story. She used to work in the City of London as a trader for one of the world’s leading investment banks. After a while she realized that she had hit a ceiling and would never make as much money as her male colleagues. Also the stress and the long hours were damaging her health. She left her job and spent a few weeks resting. As a favour, she started walking a friend’s dog while he was at work, and then other working people started asking her to walk their dogs for them. She charged her clients £20 an hour for each dog and they paid her in cash. By walking many dogs at once she found that she could sometimes make £500 in a day – or as much as £100,000 every year, but without paying any tax. More than she had earned in the City.
In addition to this, she liked walking, and she liked dogs.
In the middle of the morning I return Clarissa to her home in The Boltons. Once again I send a text message to the housekeeper and we exchange a few words as she takes her back. As I say goodbye to the dog I wonder what kind of life she leads away from me, on the other side of the wall. I have never seen her owners. I know nothing at all about the family she belongs to. All I know is that they never seem to be at home.
But the word ‘home’ can mean different things. Whenever I return to Romania I feel that I’m coming home but I also regard my little flat in Wandsworth as home, even though I’ve only lived there for a year and a half. It feels like my home because I come back to it every night to feel rested and safe, and I’ve filled it with objects that I love because they mean something to me.
These beautiful big houses in Chelsea are not homes in any sense that I understand. For most of the year they stand empty. Or at least, you think they are empty, but inside, there is a kind of life taking place. A phantom life. Members of staff – cleaners and cooks and chauffeurs – dust haunted rooms and polish cars in underground garages during the morning, and then gather together in the kitchen at midday to eat silent lunches. Dogs sit by windows and look out into gardens and wonder why their owners bothered to buy them in the first place. Meanwhile, the family is … where? The father is in Singapore, the mother is in Geneva, the children … who knows.
Other houses here are even emptier. They contain no furniture, no curtains at the windows, no pictures on the walls. They are always dark. In the winter, when I come back from the park or the cemetery to return the last of my dogs to its owner’s house, the silence and darkness of these streets begins to frighten me. It is as if some terrible plague has come to London and everybody has had to leave but nobody has told me. Once I walked back from the park with Jane, through the streets of Chelsea, and she explained to me that people buy these houses now – rich people – and then just let them stand there, watching money attach to them like barnacles to a sunken ship.
‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘A house like this may be worth thirty-five million pounds. Its value appreciates at the rate of ten per cent – three and a half million every year. That’s seventy thousand pounds a week. Ten thousand pounds every day. What else do you have to do, apart from buy it, and then just leave it alone? The people who own this house –’ (she pointed at the white stuccoed mansion opposite us in the street) ‘– are ten thousand pounds richer than when we walked past here this morning.’
I always learn something new, when I talk to Jane. Sometimes what she tells me fills me with a reluctant kind of respect for the people who understand, much better than I do, how to acquire and increase wealth. Other times I think that, just as a certain famous Romanian used to suck the blood from his victims’ necks, now it is money itself that has begun to drain the life out of this great city.
2
Rachel stood still and rested for a while, hands on hips, listening to the noise of the wind as it rustled the branches of the plum tree. It was one of her favourite sounds in the whole world.
It was quiet here, this breezy September afternoon. The wind rustled the branches even though the branches were laden. It had been a good crop this year. A bumper crop, that was always the expression, wasn’t it? The plums were ripe: their skins powdery and purple-pink. Rachel’s basket was three-quarters full even after ten minutes’ picking.
It had become a ritual now, a family tradition. In the middle of September, she would come to her grandparents’ house in Beverley
for a few days, and one afternoon she would take out the old wooden ladder from the garage, and lay it against the sturdiest branch of the tree, and climb up to pick the plums which her grandparents were no longer strong or agile enough to harvest. For the last three years, this had been the prelude to her setting out for Oxford at the beginning of October. But the Oxford days were over now. She had finished her studies, and graduated, and was facing an empty, uncertain future, with a lovely big burden of debt to accompany her. For the last three months she had been living with her mother in Leeds, answering job adverts and sending out CVs. All to no effect, so far, although a couple of private tutorial agencies in London had added her to their books. Something would come up, she was sure. All she could do was to keep trying.
She ate one of the plums, spat the stone out, then took the ladder and leaned it up against a different branch of the tree, facing the house now. This way she could reach some of the topmost fruit. After climbing the ladder, she could also see across the back garden and into her grandparents’ bedroom, where Gran was sitting up on the bed. She had the Telegraph spread out on her lap but she wasn’t reading it. She had her head thrown back and her mouth half open, but she wasn’t asleep either, as Rachel had first thought: after a few seconds she raised herself, drank from the mug of tea on her bedside table and stared tiredly around her. She looked pale and anxious. Grandad had been ill for about a week now, with stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhoea. They both referred to it as his ‘tummy bug’, and for several days this is what everyone had thought it was, but this morning there had been blood in his stools so Gran and Rachel had phoned the GP and on her advice driven him straight to the hospital. Grandad had been put on a ward without too much delay and this afternoon they were going to do some tests. ‘It’s probably just a really nasty tummy bug,’ Gran kept saying, and Rachel wanted to believe her, wanted to believe there was nothing seriously wrong, but still …
The feeling she had was not strong enough to be called a premonition. It was hardly even strong enough to be called a feeling. But in the rustling of the branches as the wind brushed against them, Rachel thought that she could hear the quietest, most evanescent whisper of something momentous. It was quite different from the way that, eleven years earlier, the death of David Kelly had made her feel. That death had chilled her, even as a young girl. It had seemed not just final, but tragic and unnecessary. Whereas, the message that the wind was trying to bring her – and it wasn’t necessarily about death, she couldn’t allow herself to believe that, just yet – was less shocking, less unforeseen, but somehow even sadder. It had a kind of gentle inevitability about it. It belonged to the same cycle of seasons that brought rich clusters of fruit to this tree at the end of every summer.
The near-silence of the afternoon was broken, at this point, by the muffled shrilling of Rachel’s smartphone as it vibrated in her pocket. Contorting herself carefully on the ladder, she managed to ease the phone out of her pocket and bring it to her ear, noting as she did so that the caller info on the screen said simply ‘Albion’.
‘Hello?’ she said, and a couple of minutes later she was shimmying down the ladder and running back into the house, upstairs to her grandparents’ bedroom, where she woke Gran, who had finally fallen into a doze, and said:
‘Gran, Gran, I’m really sorry to wake you up, but I’m going to have to go. I’ve got a job. I’m going to have to go home and pack.’
‘Oh, lovey, that’s wonderful news,’ said Gran, although she looked more bewildered than happy.
‘I’m really sorry to leave you by yourself.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’
‘Maybe Mum can come and stay with you for a bit.’
‘I’ll be fine. I can look after myself.’
‘Yes, but … waiting to hear from the hospital and everything …’
‘Oh, that’ll be all right. He’s just got a nasty tummy bug. I expect he’ll be coming home tomorrow. Or even tonight.’
‘OK,’ said Rachel, uncertainly. ‘As long as you’re sure.’
‘It’s wonderful that you’ve got a job, after all that waiting. Is it those tutoring people?’
‘That’s right. It’s only for a week, though.’
‘Never mind. It’s a start, isn’t it? It’s bound to lead to something else.’
‘I hope so. I’m just sorry I’m going to be so far away when you’re waiting for Grandad’s results.’
‘Oh, London isn’t far away.’
‘The job isn’t in London. It’s in –’ (and Rachel found herself frowning even as she said it, since even to her it seemed so unlikely, even though Mr Campion had been quite clear about it on the phone) ‘– South Africa.’
3
As soon as the butler showed her to her tent, Rachel realized that it was not really a tent at all. In fact, the presence of a butler should itself have been a giveaway. The servant, dressed in fez and long white tunic, said nothing to her until they reached the huge canopied space, shaded by jackalberry trees, where a king-size double bed dominated the living area. Even then, he kept his words to a minimum.
‘Toilet,’ he said, opening the door to the toilet.
‘Shower,’ he said, opening the door to the shower.
‘Table,’ he said, pointing to the relevant item, a handsome rosewood dining table at the far end of the decking, commanding a fine view of the swimming pool and the surrounding tents, all of which, at this hour of the day, were empty.
‘This is … beautiful,’ said Rachel, more or less lost for words. ‘Where are Mr and Mrs Gunn?’
‘Sir Gilbert and her ladyship are on safari,’ said the butler. ‘The children as well. They will be back at six o’clock in time for dinner. They said, Relax, Make yourself comfortable.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rachel. ‘I will.’
‘I’ll bring some food,’ said the butler. ‘You want wine, champagne?’
‘Just water, please,’ said Rachel. ‘A bottle of cold water.’
‘You have water,’ said the butler, opening the door of the minibar. ‘But I will bring some more.’
Before he left, Rachel wondered whether she was supposed to tip him – she had absolutely no idea of the protocol at places like this – but realized in any case that she had no local currency. She had not paid for anything so far – not the connecting flight from Johannesburg to the Skukuza aerodrome, nor the chauffered Land Rover which had brought her to the camp – nor did she have any means of doing so, apart from a Visa card with a credit limit which would probably not cover the half of it. Besides, she already felt uncomfortable, being waited on by this courteous, statuesque black man, and thought that the offer of a tip might be patronizing. It was just one of the many confusing aspects of the ridiculous situation in which she found herself.
The butler spared her any further embarrassment by leaving wordlessly. Rachel unpacked her things and then took the first of many showers (it was midday, and outrageously hot). After which, she sat on the decking, drinking her water and looking once again through the blue plastic folder with the Albion Tutorials logo, and beneath it their enigmatic strapline: ‘Delivering British Educational Solutions to International Clients’.
It didn’t, of course, answer any of the questions that were pulsing through her head. Why had she been brought here at such short notice? How long would she be staying? What were her duties supposed to be? Mr Campion (Bill, as he’d kept telling her to call him) hadn’t been able to enlighten her much.
‘Don’t be freaked out about it,’ he’d said. ‘These people have a lot of money. To you, it may seem like a big deal that they�
��re flying you all the way out there. But to them, it really isn’t. You’re going there to do some work with Lucas, Sir Gilbert’s son from his first marriage. For some reason Sir Gilbert took a dislike to the last tutor and hasn’t renewed his contract. He says you don’t need to take out any books or anything like that. I think he has something in mind that’s a bit … more general. He has two daughters, as well – twins – by his current marriage, to the second Lady Gunn, who I believe used to be a fashion model, and is originally from Kazakhstan. I don’t think you’ll be having much to do with them on this trip. Just relax and enjoy it. It’s not everyone who gets to go on a luxury safari without paying!’
‘Relax and enjoy it.’ That had been the advice, but Rachel was finding it impossible to follow. She spent the afternoon lying on her bed, regretting the fact that there was no cell phone coverage in the Kruger national park, and wondering if her grandfather’s test results had come through yet.
*
Shortly after six o’clock, the stillness of the camp was broken by the arrival of a jeep, carrying three African guides and a family of five. The guides were in good spirits as they helped the family down the high step from the vehicle to ground level. There were two pretty young girls of about eight or nine, and a tall, handsome, but slightly pale and dreamy-looking boy in his late teens. Sir Gilbert Gunn was in his mid-fifties, grey-haired and serious: Rachel recognized him from the picture on his Wikipedia page. The elegant blonde accompanying him, some twenty years his junior, was presumably his second wife, Madiana. ‘Don’t appear too shy or backward,’ Mr Campion had said, ‘they won’t appreciate it. They only like strong people.’ So she bounded down the steps from her tent and held out her hand in greeting.
‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’m Rachel. From Albion Tutors. Thank you for bringing me here.’