by Jonathan Coe
One evening in late November, then, it was a surprise for Rachel to catch a glimpse of Sir Gilbert as she left the house by the back door (as always) and picked her way through the abandoned builders’ materials on her way to the front entrance and a date with Jamie. Her employer was standing between the Grecian columns at the top of the steps, saying goodbye to another man and shaking his hand. As the door was closed and the man descended the steps to catch up with her, she saw that it was Frederick Francis.
‘Well, hello,’ he said, stretching the word again in that annoyingly flirtatious way. They hadn’t seen each other since the trip to the Kruger national park.
‘Hello, Frederick,’ said Rachel, stopping short of using the friendly abbreviation.
‘Something of a mess, isn’t it?’ he said, surveying the jumble of ladders, drills, masonry, ironware and cement mixers that the builders had left behind.
‘I find I’m getting used to it,’ said Rachel, pushing the temporary door open and stepping out into the street through the hoarding.
‘Of course,’ said Freddie, hurrying to keep up with her, ‘you’ve become quite the fixture around here, I understand.’
‘Well, it was nice seeing you again,’ she said, preparing to head off down the street.
‘Wait a minute. Where are you going?’ said Freddie.
‘I’ve got a date.’
‘Heading for the West End?’
‘Soho.’
‘Well, Jules is going to drive me that way. We can give you a lift.’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Oh, come on. It’s a free ride. Don’t be so puritanical.’
In truth, Rachel needed to save the money, even if it was only a few pounds on her Oyster card. She accepted the lift, and settled with an involuntary sigh of pleasure into the deeply cushioned leather seat at the rear of the Mercedes. The leather was heated, she could not help noticing, a feature which itself was extremely welcome on this chilly winter night.
‘I mustn’t get too comfortable, must I?’ she said. ‘It’d be a mistake to get used to this level of luxury.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Freddie, ‘I think it would be very good for you to get used to it. Everyone should experience a ride in a car like this at least once. Then they’d have something to aspire to.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Rachel.
She stared out of the window as the car purred north, through The Boltons and across the Brompton Road. She was surprised by how clearly she could see: from the outside, the window had looked completely opaque.
‘And who’s the lucky man you’re meeting tonight?’ Freddie asked.
‘Do you come to the house often?’ Rachel said, not shifting her gaze from the passing houses. ‘Only I’ve never seen you there before.’
‘I’m very discreet,’ said Freddie. ‘Now you see me, now you don’t.’ When this remark failed to have any effect, he added: ‘So … you’re curious about me. I’m flattered.’
‘Don’t be. This job gives me a lot of time to myself. I’ve got to think about something.’
Discouraged by this response, Freddie fell silent.
‘I did Google you, though,’ said Rachel, as flatly as she could.
‘Really? And what did you find?’
‘Mostly, stuff about a British film director. As for you – well, very little, actually.’
‘Just as it should be.’
‘I found the name of the firm you work for. But I didn’t find out much about what you do.’
‘It’s not really in the public domain.’
‘I did notice something, though. It said you used to work for a private bank called Stewards’. And so did Sir Gilbert, according to Wikipedia.’
‘Well, well. We have a real cyber-detective in our midst. That’s how we met, of course. On the trading floor of Stewards’. Back in the late eighties.’ He sighed. ‘Ah, happy times.’ The car was paused at traffic lights, waiting to turn left into the Cromwell Road. Jules was listening to Magic FM, turned down to an unobtrusive volume. ‘The boss of Stewards’ in those days was a man called Thomas Winshaw. A legendary figure. He treated the traders as if we were his favourite sons. The sons he never had. Gil was the outstanding one, of course. I was good, but I didn’t have his flair, his nerves of steel. Currency trading was his thing. His deals started getting bolder and bolder – I mean, if we’d stopped to think about it (which we never did), he was really putting the whole of the bank’s funds at serious risk, sometimes – but Thomas trusted him, he let him get on with it, and then in 1992 he put a huge bet – and I mean a really, really huge one – on the pound crashing out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Which is what happened, of course. It was called Black Wednesday, because it was a bad day, for most people, a terrible day. But not for Gilbert. My God, how we all celebrated that night! We must have spent about thirty grand on champagne alone. We drank one toast after another to Thomas, who of course was no longer with us, by then. He had … passed on, the year before, in horrible circumstances. But that hadn’t stopped us. It had just made us more reckless than ever, in fact: more determined.
‘After a couple more years,’ said Freddie, as the car eased its way through the Knightsbridge traffic, gliding past slower, less powerful vehicles with no apparent effort, ‘we were both getting tired of the money markets. You burn out, in that world, pretty quickly. Gilbert formed Gunnery Holdings, and started buying and selling companies. He moved into property development. Started expanding, diversifying. He had a big fortune to play with, by now, a massive fortune. I was still at Stewards’, stagnating a bit, getting more and more restless. And one night I met him for a drink, at some private members’ club. We got pretty pissed, talked about this and that. And I realized that, even though things were going so well for him, he wasn’t happy.’
‘Perhaps he was developing a conscience,’ said Rachel.
Freddie smiled. ‘Guess again.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rachel. ‘What could possibly have been making him unhappy?’
If there was any irony underpinning the question, Freddie missed it. ‘Well, it was quite simple. He felt that he was paying too much tax.’
Rachel snorted.
‘Oh, it shouldn’t surprise you. It doesn’t matter how generous the government is, however much they lower the top rate. If you’re bringing home ten million a year, you’re writing an annual cheque to the Inland Revenue for four million pounds. It’s not a question of how rich you are. That feels like a lot of money. It hurts.’
‘My heart bleeds for him,’ said Rachel.
‘It wasn’t just him. I realized that plenty of people in his position – not that there were many Brits in London who were as wealthy as Gilbert, by this stage – were feeling the same way. So I decided that was where the future lay. My future, anyway.’
‘Tax avoidance? Charming.’
‘Tax management, is what I prefer to call it.’
‘I’m sure you do. So where do you go to learn that, then? Do they send you on a course?’
‘Well, I took what I thought to be the simplest and most obvious route. I went to work with HMRC for a while.’
‘You became a tax inspector?’
‘It seemed to be the best way of learning the ins and outs of the system. You’d be surprised, nowadays, how many tax inspectors leave the Revenue and go straight into the City to set themselves up as independent advisers. But I was one of the first. I blazed the trail.’
‘Your mother must be very proud.’
Freddie was starting to tire of Rachel’s sarcasm. ‘This
chap you’re meeting tonight,’ he said. ‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a postgrad,’ said Rachel. ‘He’s writing a thesis on The Invisible Man.’ She noticed Freddie’s blank look. ‘H. G. Wells.’
‘A whole thesis,’ he said, incredulously, ‘on one book?’
‘He’s using invisibility as a metaphor,’ said Rachel, not sure why she was bothering to explain any of this, ‘to talk about politics. How people become invisible, when the system loses sight of them.’
‘Sounds as though he’s spotted a real gap in the market there.’
‘Not everybody thinks about “the market” when they decide what to do with their lives.’ She leaned forward and addressed the chauffeur. ‘Could you let me out here please, Jules?’
The car pulled over and came to a noiseless halt.
‘Well, let me know when he makes his first million,’ said Freddie. ‘I’ll help minimize his tax liability.’
‘Lovely talking to you,’ said Rachel, and then she said thank you and goodbye to Jules before stepping out into the crowds of tourists clogging up Shaftesbury Avenue; relieved to find herself surrounded, once again, by people she felt she could probably understand.
9
‘So, you had a nice time last night, with your boyfriend?’ said Livia.
‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Rachel, smiling, but she did not divulge any more information. She didn’t feel that she knew Livia well enough yet.
This was their third walk together, and their longest. Livia had three dogs today: Mortimer, plus a pair of Airedale terriers she collected from a flat in a mansion block off Gloucester Road. They took the dogs to Hyde Park, let them off the lead near the Round Pond and then, when they had run themselves into a state of near-exhaustion, strolled over to the Serpentine Gallery. Now they were crossing West Carriage Drive and heading down towards the café. It was a bright and sunny but fiercely cold morning in early December. It seemed the only people in the park that day were women walking their dogs: they’d already come across Jane, the Queen of dog-walkers, who sometimes walked as many as ten at a time. Her dogs had been restless and unruly this morning, so they’d not had much time to stop and talk. Now Mortimer and the Airedales were looking tired and ready for a bowl of water.
Rachel was starting to like Livia very much. By training she was a musician. She played in a string quartet which gave occasional London recitals but of course she did not earn anything from this, and walking dogs provided the bulk of her meagre income. Her instrument was the cello and, to Rachel’s ears, her voice itself was reminiscent of a cello, with something of its sonorous depth and melancholy richness. She spoke slowly and carefully, with a thick Romanian accent which sometimes made her words hard to understand.
‘You remember that woman I told you about?’ she said, when they were sitting inside the café, in the warmth, with expensive lattes in front of them. ‘The one who has the same kind of cancer as your grandfather?’
‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘I remember. You said she’d come out of hospital and was doing really well.’
‘That’s right. Well, last week she asked me to walk her dog again. She has a wonderful Afghan hound, called William. She lives in a house between the Kings Road and the river. A beautiful part of Chelsea. The house is only small but I think it is worth several million pounds. My client, whose name is Hermione, is a member of the aristocracy, I think. She is some sort of duchess or baroness or something – I don’t really understand what all these titles mean in this country. Anyway, as I said to you last time, she was told almost two years ago that she had cancer of the liver and would only live for a few months. Just like your grandfather has been told. They didn’t want to give her chemotherapy or radiotherapy or anything like that. But when she went into hospital she was taken to see a doctor who said there were new drugs which could help with this condition. Not to cure it, just to make it easier to bear. So last week I asked her what these drugs were called and she told me that they were giving her one called cetuximab. And she said it had helped her a lot. It had removed many of the symptoms and there had not been many side effects. Of course, she still has the cancer, there’s nothing she can do about that, but she was diagnosed two years ago now and since then her quality of life has been good, very good. She’s just come back from visiting friends in Paris and now she’s going to spend Christmas in Rome with her daughter.’
‘That sounds amazing,’ said Rachel.
‘Are you seeing your grandfather soon?’
‘Yes, I’ll be seeing him at Christmas. I’m not sure whether he’ll be at home or in hospital. But I’ll definitely be seeing him.’
‘Then maybe you can ask his doctor if he can give him some of these drugs.’
‘Yes, I will,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s got to be worth a try, hasn’t it?’
10
Grace and Sophia’s school term came to an end two weeks before Christmas. At around the same time, Lucas returned from Eton, reporting that his interview at Oxford had been a great success. (He would find out, in the New Year, that he had won a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, and by way of thanks would present Rachel with an expensive, linen-covered notebook from a stationer’s in Venice.) Madiana told Rachel that her services would probably not be required, now, until the beginning of January, and she was free to go home.
Her grandfather had been moved to a hospice on the outskirts of Beverley. It was a functional, 1970s redbrick building, surrounded by a couple of acres of lawn which were dusted with patchy snow on the afternoon that Rachel made her first visit. Her mother and grandmother were with her. They had stopped off at the local supermarket to buy some packets of fruit salad, since Gran was concerned that Grandad was not getting enough fruit. As their car pulled into the crowded car park, in the middle of the afternoon, the December light was already beginning to fade. The thin, half-hearted snow was turning to sleet. Rachel took her grandmother’s arm, feeling the sharp boniness of her elbow even through her thick tweed coat, and supported her as she shuffled slowly and carefully across the icy asphalt. It took a long time to get from the car to the entrance, with its glowing yellow light and promise of warmth: long enough for Rachel to reflect on the desperate sadness of the occasion, but also – again – its sense of inevitability. She remembered the whisper she had heard amidst the branches of the plum tree a few months earlier.
As for Grandad’s appearance, Rachel had been expecting the worst, and she found it. He was sitting up in bed, in a ward with five other patients. He was the one, without doubt, who looked most seriously ill. He had lost so much weight that his collar-and breastbones stood out starkly where his pyjama jacket lay open. His skin had yellowed horribly. He was attached to a subcutaneous drip and the smile of recognition when he saw them enter the ward was faint and effortful. Almost as soon as they pulled up their chairs and sat around the bed, the listless gaze returned to his eyes. His throat was parched and conversation seemed to sap his energy. His hand kept straying to the right-hand side of his stomach, which he would touch involuntarily even though it made him wince in pain.
Their visit lasted a slow, agonizing thirty minutes. After that it was clear that all he wanted to do was sleep.
Out in the car park, darkness had already descended and the sleet had turned to rain. They had to pay three pounds to get out through the automatic barrier.
‘I can remember when parking in hospital car parks was free,’ was all that Gran said. It was all that any of them said.
*
Rachel and her mother decided to spend Christmas in Beverley. Gran did not want to come to Leeds: she wanted to stay as near to the h
ospice as possible, and to visit Grandad every day, however little pleasure he seemed to derive from it. Christmas day was quiet, just the three of them. Rachel’s brother Nick was abroad somewhere: Copenhagen, they thought, with his current girlfriend, who was apparently Danish. On Christmas afternoon they visited Grandad in his ward and took him a box of chocolates and more fruit. He said that he didn’t want either. They gave the chocolates to the ward sister, who put them with two other, similar boxes beneath the Christmas tree in the entrance hall. The lights on the tree winked on and off fitfully, and the nurse behind the reception desk had brought in a CD player which played a party disc of carols and Christmas pop songs from a time before Rachel was born. The place had never seemed more cheerless.
This time, being in her grandparents’ house was proving a strange experience for Rachel. She could not believe how small it seemed. At the Gunns’ house in Turngreet Road, she had grown accustomed to high ceilings and airy, spacious rooms. Now she felt like Gulliver returning from Brobdingnag and trying to get used to normal human proportions again. The days seemed absurdly short. Darkness would have enveloped the garden by three thirty and at that point, having paid their daily visit to the hospice, they would draw the curtains, have a quick tea of eggs or beans or sardines on toast, then try to find something distracting to watch on the television. The Gunns, Rachel believed, were in the Caribbean somewhere. She imagined Grace and Sophia splashing and laughing in a turquoise lagoon while Madiana lay on a sunbed beneath the shade of a coconut tree, sipping cocktails.
She sent regular texts to Jamie. He was with his parents in Somerset. Livia had gone back to Bucharest. The days passed slowly, the hours dragged. They allowed New Year’s Eve to pass without notice, let alone celebration.