Number 11

by Jonathan Coe

  At night, when the television was turned off, the house fell silent. In fact Rachel soon came to realize that this part of London was defined by its extremes of silence and noise. During the daytime the noise pollution from building works was overwhelming, whereas at night a profound and eerie stillness settled upon the whole area. Most of these houses had been bought as investments: there was rarely anyone living in them, and after dark, the quietness and emptiness of the streets was unsettling. One of the things that had most impressed Rachel about the rich, since she had started to know them, was their ability to disappear. She mentioned this to Jamie once, when discussing his thesis on ‘invisible people’ in the new age of austerity. ‘But you shouldn’t just be writing about poor people,’ she told him. ‘The rich can make themselves invisible too.’

  Rachel and Jamie saw each other two or three times a week: the days varied, but Sunday was a constant. On Sundays they would meet for a late breakfast or early lunch, and then take in a gallery or museum or film screening at a Curzon cinema or the BFI. Rachel felt strongly attracted to Jamie, but he was very absorbed in his work, and for her own part, she still did not feel quite ready for a full-blown relationship: her experiences in the last few months had made her realize how much she still had to learn, not just about the world but about herself. And so, for the time being, they were taking things slowly.

  It was late one Sunday morning in January, when she was getting ready to meet him at a pub in Little Venice, that Rachel’s mobile rang and she saw Madiana’s name on the incoming call screen.

  ‘Rachel?’ said that flat, imperious voice. ‘The girls need you. You have to come at once.’

  ‘Erm, sure …’ said Rachel, her heart sinking. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that the girls have a maths exam tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Well, it’s only a little test, really, not an exam.’

  ‘But they don’t understand these equations at all. You’re going to have to come and explain them.’

  ‘OK.’ Doubtless this would mean a trip up the M40 to ‘the cottage’. ‘Where are you, where do you want me to come?’

  It seemed that Madiana, Gilbert and the twins were not at the cottage this weekend, however. They were in Lausanne.

  She was there in less than three hours. Jules drove her to the helipad in Battersea: she texted Jamie on the way to say that she wouldn’t be able to see him that day after all. From there, a helicopter took her to a private airfield just outside Oxford, where a LearJet was waiting to carry her to Switzerland.

  It was her first time in Sir Gilbert’s private plane (or anybody’s, for that matter). The flight was, as she might have expected, intensely pleasurable. She helped herself to a chicken caesar salad from the galley kitchen and washed it down with a cold bottle of Peroni. She stretched out in one of the wide, yielding, smoothly upholstered club seats and passed the time flicking through pristine copies of Vogue and Tatler. She remembered what Frederick Francis had said when they rode towards Soho in the Mercedes together: ‘Everyone should experience a ride in a car like this at least once. Then they’d have something to aspire to.’ She could see his point. One of these days – perhaps sooner rather than later – she was going to part company with the Gunns, and after that she would never know luxury like this again. Coming down to earth would be difficult.

  The eighty-minute flight went by all too quickly. They landed just a couple of miles from the city centre at another small airfield. A driver was waiting to pick her up and take her to the Beau-Rivage Palace, where Madiana and the rest of the family were having lunch. Their party was occupying two tables: a children’s table, where Grace and Sophia were joined by two boys and a girl of similar age, and an adults’ table, where Sir Gilbert and Lady Gunn sat with another couple, a man Rachel did not recognize, and the ubiquitous Frederick Francis himself, who gave her a little conspiratorial wave (which she ignored) as a waiter led her towards them. Both tables had a view across the empty hotel terrace towards Lake Geneva. In the furnishings and the understated conversation of the other diners there was an atmosphere of cold, clinical elegance.

  ‘Rachel, how good of you to join us,’ said Madiana, half rising from her seat to shake her hand. ‘You’re sitting with the children. Order whatever you want from the menu. All their books are ready for you. See if you can make sense of these ridiculous equations.’

  Thereby dismissed from the main table, Rachel took her seat next to the twins and looked quickly through the menu. She had noticed that the restaurant boasted two Michelin stars, but instead of langoustine à la plancha or Challans duck with beetroot confit, all of the children had asked for cheeseburgers and chips. She ordered a cheese fondue ravioli without really thinking about it, and then turned her attention to the maths. All the girls had been asked to revise were some quite simple linear equations and she was able to bring them both up to speed within about ten minutes. She wrote out six more equations to test them and they both got full marks, so after that she was confident her job was done. She ate the rest of her meal in silence, looking out over the lake, and listened to the stilted chatter of the children: the two boys and their sister appeared to be from a Swiss family and spoke a mixture of perfect French and perfect English, but they didn’t seem to have much to say to the Gunn twins, who in any case were more interested in their iPhones.

  ‘So, did the girls finish their maths?’ Madiana asked, at the end of the meal.

  ‘Yes, no problem. They’re primed and ready to go.’

  ‘Good. Well, Pascale has invited us back to her apartment for tea.’ Rachel thought, at first, that she might be included under the umbrella term ‘us’, but her employer’s next words disabused her of that idea. ‘You have three hours in which to amuse yourself. The driver will pick you up here and then you and the girls and Mr Francis will all travel home together.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Rachel. ‘Do you happen to know if there’s a cashpoint nearby? I didn’t have time …’

  ‘Oh. Of course. Take this,’ said Madiana, handing her two fifty-franc notes. ‘We’ll settle it up later.’

  Rachel thanked her, allowed a waiter to help her on with her overcoat, and then went outside to become acquainted with the streets of Lausanne.

  *

  She walked for about an hour, at first by the side of the lake and then through the wide, almost empty boulevards of the city centre, which seemed modern and comfortable but completely without character. Even though Lausanne was a lot closer to London than the Kruger national park, and the weather was impeccably British (cold and grey), she felt just as disorientated by this abrupt transplantation to an unexpected country. She thought about calling Jamie, wanting to hear his familiar voice again, but she wasn’t sure what the cost of the call would be, and didn’t want to risk it.

  Another ten minutes’ aimless walking brought her to the Avenue Bergières, where she paused outside the entrance to a museum. What appeared to be a fairly modest private house opposite the Palais de Beaulieu promised its visitors something called the ‘Collection de l’Art Brut’. Rachel had never heard the term before, but her attention was drawn by the posters outside, depicting strange animals and grotesque landscapes in bright, mesmerizing colours. Venturing inside, having handed over her money and picked up a programme, she read the following note from the museum’s curator: ‘In 1945, Jean Dubuffet decided upon the term “Art Brut” to designate a creative output by people who are self-taught, who work outside of any institutional framework, beyond all rules and all artistic considerations. For the most part, these are solitary people, persons living on the fringes of socie
ty or committed to psychiatric hospitals.’

  Even this definition did not prepare her for the surprises, the infinite variety, the disturbing revelations that the museum itself held in store. For the next hour and a half, Rachel wandered through a dream world, a chaos of surreal visions and nightmarish imaginings. Distorted human figures were rendered in stark, primitive shapes and outlines. Hallucinatory creatures, half-man and halfanimal, reared up on sheets of paper on which every other inch of available space had been scribbled over with minute fragments of text whose meaning could be fathomed only by the artist. Fantastically detailed, wildly colourful pointillist canvases challenged the viewer to decide whether she was looking at something entirely abstract or, in some occult, coded way, representational. Weird political slogans were juxtaposed with deformed nudes or hideously lifelike faces constructed of found materials such as coral or sea-shells. A terrifying sculpture of an animal head boasted real, jagged and blackened teeth and a sharpened, lethal-looking horn protruding from its vulpine nose. One artist’s contribution consisted of nothing but endless letters of legal complaint and recrimination, written on massive sheets of paper with no margins and tiny, insistent handwriting, the words smothering and stumbling over each other to create (as the catalogue put it) ‘the impression of a graphic logorrhoea’.

  To some, perhaps, this would seem to be the world of the madhouse. To Rachel, the museum’s contents felt as sane and as logical as anything she had seen in the last four months. She felt immediately, profoundly at home.

  The museum housed a permanent collection but there was also a temporary exhibition in a room to the rear. This space was devoted, at the moment, to the ‘Bestiary’ of an artist from Barcelona called Josep Baqué.

  Baqué, it seemed, had spent his peripatetic early life in Marseilles, DÜsseldorf and l’Avesnois – carving gravestones, among other things – but had returned to Barcelona in 1928 and passed the remaining forty years working there as a traffic policeman. During that time it was known that he made drawings, some of which were sought after by collectors, although, ‘modeste jusqu’à l’excès’, he always refused to sell them. Until his death in 1967, however, nobody knew the extent of his productivity: his family discovered 1,500 drawings of every shape and size, almost all of them showing mythical or semi-mythical beasts rendered in vivid colours and crude but detailed, even obsessive brushwork. Here were dragons and lizards; mutant hybrids of the horse and the flamingo; sea-snakes, turtles and multicoloured fish with looks of haunted sadness in their eyes; strange insects – beetles with butterfly wings, centipedes with bulging red lips and the teeth of a hydra. And here, too, were spiders.

  Rachel had been on the point of leaving the museum, exhausted by the intensity of the experience it offered, when she came upon Josep Baqué’s spiders. And she looked on them, at once, with a shock of recognition. For more than ten years now, wherever she went, she had kept with her the playing card which had been given to her by Phoebe, the ‘Mad Bird Woman’, at the foot of the Black Tower in Beverley. It was the card that Alison had discovered, discarded and lost, in the woodland one evening; one of a pair belonging to Phoebe, and which she had given to Lu, the Chinese vagrant to whom she had briefly offered shelter in that long-lost summer, the summer of 2003. The picture on this playing card showed a spider, which Rachel had always considered to be a horrific thing: standing upright on two of its legs, and raising the others fiercely in the air as if challenging someone to a fight. And here it was again. Exactly the same. How was this possible? How could this gruesome, almost stomach-turning illustration – which could be dated, according to the catalogue, no more precisely than ‘entre 1932 et 1967’ – have found its way into a pack of Pelmanism cards which had once belonged to Phoebe’s parents? Rachel had no idea. And yet the proof was here. She looked at this painting, framed, numbered, labelled, hanging on the wall of a museum in Switzerland to which the strangest of circumstances had brought her, and knew that she was staring at one of the icons, one of the most formative images, of her own past life. Here, taking its place among all the other works which today appeared to her as pure howls of anguish; howls of terrible beauty, born of the poverty and isolation of the dispossessed.

  ‘These people had nothing, that’s the amazing thing,’ she said to Frederick, as she continued to pore over the museum’s hefty illustrated catalogue on the plane back to London. The reproductions of the artwork were mere distant echoes of the originals, but Rachel found herself fascinated, anyway, not by the illustrations but by the life stories of the different artists. She read of Fernando Nannetti, an electrician from Rome who suffered from lifelong hallucinations and persecution mania, but produced an enormous handwritten oeuvre carved into the walls of his psychiatric institution; of Joseph Giavarini, the ‘Prisoner of Basel’, who shot his mistress dead, and then, in prison, spent his time fashioning beautiful statuettes out of chewed bread, the only material available to him; of Marguerite Sir, a farmer’s daughter from south-eastern France who fell victim to schizophrenia, became convinced at the age of sixty-five that she was an eighteen-year-old girl about to marry, and spent the rest of her life creating and embroidering a magnificent bridal dress for the wedding that would never take place; of Clément Fraisse, who, at the age of twenty-four, after attempting to set fire to his parents’ farm using a packet of flaming bank notes representing the family savings, was sent to an asylum where for one year he lived in a cell measuring six feet by nine, the whole of which he decorated in carvings of incredible craftsmanship and detail. Turning the pages, Rachel read one story after another of this sort: unimaginable cases of confinement without end, illness without hope. ‘They had nothing, and yet they produced this astonishing work. They created. They gave. They gave these beautiful objects back to the society which had taken everything away from them.’

  Freddie grunted. He was only half listening. The Sunday Times business pages were absorbing most of his attention. Everything about his posture, his indifference, his arrogance suddenly struck Rachel and ignited in her a flame of indignation.

  ‘Bit of a contrast,’ she said, ‘to some people I could mention. The sort of people who’ve got everything but never give anything back at all.’

  ‘Spare me the moralizing,’ said Freddie wearily, putting the newspaper down at last. ‘For your information, Sir Gilbert – if that’s who you’re talking about – has already created more jobs than most people will create in a lifetime. He employs people, he pays wages, he spends his money in hotels and restaurants and car showrooms. Everybody benefits from that. Everybody.’

  ‘Really?’ said Rachel. ‘And yet he hardly pays any taxes. Thanks to you.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh, I’m beginning to get a pretty good idea. You follow them around the world, giving them bits of paper to sign – a trust fund here, an offshore account there. Moving their money around to places where the tax people can’t get near it. Madiana probably has non-dom status, doesn’t she? What’s the betting most of Gilbert’s companies are in her name? What’s the betting he declares about the same level of income as a nurse?’

  ‘Everything we do,’ said Freddie, ‘is perfectly within the law.’

  ‘Well, one of these days the law might change.’

  ‘Why would that happen?’

  ‘Because people are getting fed up.’

  ‘So the revolution’s on its way, is it? “The people” are getting ready to man the barricades and dust down the guillotines? I don’t think so. Give them enough ready meals and nights in front of the TV watching celebrities being humiliated in the jungle and they won’t ev
en want to leave their sofas. No, the law on this won’t be changing any time soon. As it happens I attended a reception at Number 11 just the other day and had a long conversation with the Chancellor, and he very much has … other priorities, I would say.’

  ‘You know each other, do you?’

  ‘Family ties. Our fathers were at prep school together.’

  Rachel raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Oh my God. This country really hasn’t changed at all in the last hundred years, has it?’

  ‘That’s because the current system works perfectly well.’

  ‘Nobody minds the rich being rich,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s just that there has to come a point where enough is enough.’

  Freddie laughed.