by Jonathan Coe
‘I mean, why do they need a basement that’s eleven storeys deep? Why did they need to fly me out to Switzerland when we could just as easily have done that homework tonight at home?’
‘One of the things I like about you, Rachel,’ Freddie said, ‘is your modesty. I don’t think you realize what an asset you are to this family. Madiana flew you out to Lausanne so she could show Pascale – who is one of the wealthiest as well as one of the snobbiest people in Switzerland – that her daughters have a private tutor who will come running at the click of a finger. You should have heard her at lunch – she never stopped talking about you. “Oh yes, she studied Latin at Oxford University.” “Of course she graduated with first-class honours.”’
‘There’s no such thing as a degree in Latin,’ Rachel pointed out. ‘I did English. And I got a 2.1.’
‘Well, good for you,’ said Freddie. ‘I think that’s jolly impressive. Have a glass of champagne to celebrate.’
But Rachel would not let the subject go. ‘The poorest half of the world has the same amount of money as the richest eighty-five people. Did you know that?’
‘Of course I did,’ he said, sounding impatient now. ‘It was in all the papers a few months ago. It’s a meaningless statistic.’
‘Meaningless? Doesn’t it make you think?’
‘It makes me think the poorest half of the world should get their act together.’
‘Really?’ Rachel stared at him, looking for traces of irony, reluctant to believe that he could actually mean what he was saying. She was forced to conclude that he did. ‘I’ll never understand you, or people like you. What … gives you pleasure, exactly? What do you live for?’
‘I’ll tell you what turns me on,’ said Freddie, although this wasn’t quite the question he’d been asked. ‘Youthful outpourings of political naivety. I find those incredibly exciting. In fact the only thing that’s more exciting is when they’re delivered in a Yorkshire accent.’ He looked around, and gestured with his eyes towards the toilet at the rear of the cabin. ‘Come on, this is our chance to join the mile-high club. On a private jet! When are you going to have an opportunity like this again?’
Rachel reminded him that there were children on board, and to emphasize the fact, she spent the rest of the flight sitting with them.
*
The Mercedes was waiting for them again at Battersea helipad, but, unusually, Faustina was there too, sitting in the car with her husband. On the drive home, she placed herself between the girls on the back seat, with Rachel in the front. Freddie took a taxi home. Faustina kept both arms around the girls and hugged them tightly. Neither she nor Jules talked very much. The atmosphere was tense, uneasy.
‘Is something wrong?’ Rachel asked, when they reached the house. Faustina took the twins straight up the front steps, almost pushing them along. Rachel and Jules took their usual route around to the back.
‘I’ll show you.’
Instead of using the staff door that opened onto the little kitchen, he led Rachel up the steps and into the garden. It was filled with builders’ junk, as always, and there were illuminated warning barriers fencing off the massive pit at its centre.
Jules took Rachel right to the eastern wall and then pointed at something on the ground. It was a scrap of tarpaulin, covering what appeared to be some sort of animal shape.
‘Mortimer,’ he said simply.
‘Oh no …’ Rachel knelt down, and reached out to touch the motionless bundle. ‘Not Mortimer.’ Her voice cracked and tears started to well up.
‘Don’t touch,’ he said. ‘Don’t look. It’s terrible.’
‘Why?’ said Rachel. ‘Why, what happened?’
‘Something attacked him. We heard terrible noises in the garden. By the time we got there, he was dead.’
‘But what could have attacked him? A fox? No, he could win a fight with a fox, surely?’
‘Bigger than a fox. Must be. Don’t look!’
Rachel had been about to raise the tarpaulin in spite of herself.
‘It’s terrible. His face – all gone. Half his body – gone. Eaten.’ He took Rachel by the arm and helped her gently to her feet. ‘Come on. Come inside for a drink. We’ll tell the girls in the morning.’
14
Later, Rachel would tell the doctors that was the day – the Sunday she went to Lausanne, the day Mortimer died – that everything started to fall apart, and the horror began.
On Tuesday she had booked her visit to see Alison in Eastwood Park.
Rachel had never visited a prison before and had no idea what to expect. It was in a rural setting and involved a long bus ride from the nearest railway station, alongside passengers who all wore the same closed, mask-like but apprehensive expressions. The gateway to the prison looked more like the entrance to a suburban housing estate than anything else. Rachel had brought every piece of ID that she possessed and this was a good thing because she had to show all of them before she could be admitted to the waiting area. Here, she and the other visitors were held for more than twenty-five minutes before a bell sounded and they were led into the hall.
Rachel had not seen Alison for five years or more, and their week together in Beverley back in the summer of 2003 seemed a lifetime ago. She was looking thin and her hair was cut shorter than Rachel could ever remember seeing it. It was not clear that she was especially happy to see her old friend. The visiting hall was full, and the tables were closer together than Rachel would have imagined. They both felt uncomfortable, at first, and their conversation was stilted, consisting mainly of Alison’s answers to questions about prison routine.
‘It’s so boring,’ she kept saying. ‘Thank God we’ve got TVs in the cells because otherwise we’d go mad. Mind you, they only let you have those because lock-up’s cheaper than letting you out and having to keep an eye on you.’
‘Do you have classes and things?’
‘Yeah, they’re pretty crap, but they give you something to do. I’ve been giving a few art classes myself. Weekends are the worst. We get locked up at five fifteen. Fuck, that gets depressing.’
Rachel reached across the table and clasped her hand.
‘It’s so good to see you again. You will come and see me when you get out, won’t you?’
‘Yeah, if you want me to,’ said Alison, uncertainly.
‘Of course I do. I’ve missed you. We shouldn’t have left it so long.’
Alison hesitated a moment, and said: ‘Well, that wasn’t exactly my fault.’
Rachel frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean,’ she answered; and now, as she looked across at Rachel, there was a challenge in her eyes.
‘Alison, I wrote to you. I phoned. I texted. You never answered. Why not?’
‘Why not?’ Alison gave a quiet, disbelieving laugh. ‘Because … Because why would I want to stay friends with someone who judged me, and disapproved of me?’
‘I never did that.’
‘Didn’t you? I seem to remember that you called me a pervert.’
‘What? I never did that.’
‘You implied it.’
‘How? How did I imply it?’
Alison lowered her voice, but her tone was still emphatic as she said: ‘By saying that incest was “right up my street”.’
Rachel stared at her, staggered by this allegation. ‘When did I say that?’
‘Just after I wrote to you to say I was gay.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Rachel. ‘I really don’t.’
Alison leaned forward, more
insistent than ever. ‘We’d just started using Snapchat, remember? And I messaged you, asking if you’d got my letter.’
‘That’s right. I was at Harewood House, with my brother.’
‘And you wrote a message back. It said you were “doing the incest thing with him”.’
She sat with her arms folded, waiting for a response.
Rachel thought hard; tried to think back to that evening, sitting with her brother in the late-summer sunshine on the terrace. She and Alison had only just started using Snapchat, and she had barely used it since. She pictured herself writing with her forefinger … She couldn’t remember the message she had written, exactly, but a possible explanation began to dawn on her. A smile spread across her face, slowly, grew broader and broader, and then she put her face in her hands and rocked forwards, her body shaking. After a few seconds she looked up and said: ‘I think there’s a chance, you know– just the smallest chance – that I said I was doing the nicest thing.’ Alison’s mouth was half open in astonishment, so she repeated: ‘The nicest thing, Al. Nicest, not incest. Why would I have said incest?’
She looked at her friend, the corners of her mouth quivering, her eyes dancing with laughter. Alison stared back, still gaping stupidly. The silence seemed to go on for ever.
Then Alison, too, put her head in her hands and her laughter became so violent that it made no sound, just shook her body like an earthquake, an earthquake that was never going to stop, and when it finally died down and she was able to sit up straight and look towards Rachel directly again, she was smiling the widest, loveliest smile, a smile that was full of warmth and affection but also relief. Enormous relief. She got up and leaned across the table and folded her in a long, passionate hug. ‘Oh Rache,’ she said, ‘you don’t know how good it is to see you.’
‘You too,’ said Rachel.
‘So shall we never, ever do that again?’
‘Do what?’
‘Use social media, when we could be talking to each other.’
‘Yes,’ Rachel said, feelingly. ‘I think that would be a good idea.’
Alison withdrew to her own side of the table, laughed some more and then looked around her, taking in these drab, institutional surroundings as if she was seeing them for the first time, with a kind of wild despair.
‘I hate it in here,’ she said. ‘Thanks so much for coming. I’ve been so lonely. I know I’ve only got a couple of weeks to go, but it’s been horrible. So horrible. When I get out I’m going to find that bitch and I swear to God I’m going to tear her apart …’
‘Josephine, you mean?’ Rachel dropped her voice. ‘How did it happen, Alison? How did you end up in here?’
‘I had this girlfriend,’ Alison began. ‘Called Selena. We were together a couple of years. A lovely girl, but a bit … well, not so bright, sometimes. She was waitressing one night at a big do in Birmingham where Josephine was one of the guests, and somehow they got talking. About me. Josephine heard I was an artist, and she offered to set up a private show for me in London. Selena didn’t tell me who was doing it, she just said there was some benefactor who’d taken a shine to my work. I should really have been a bit more sensible, asked a few more questions. But it seemed like a such a break, you know? I couldn’t believe my luck.
‘I’d been doing a lot of portraits of homeless people, getting them in off the streets and painting them as if they were princes or emperors. A sort of parody of the kind of art that celebrates power and which never gets called “political” even though it obviously is. I’d started doing them when I was at college. Bit of a simple idea, really, but I thought it worked. Anyway, this gallery was hired for the night and all sorts of celebs and bigwigs turned up. It was pretty exciting, to be honest, though I didn’t make much money from it in the end. Most of the pictures were priced at five hundred quid or so and I only sold two. Most of the guests just drank the champagne and then fucked off.
‘Anyway, I know I did the wrong thing. I should have told the benefits office what I’d made. I suppose I thought I could get away with it: I’d been paid in cash and anyway … you know, it was only nine hundred quid. Not such a huge deal, in the scheme of things, I thought. I gave half the money to Mum because she really needed a new cooker: hers hadn’t been working properly all winter. Still, it was enough for Josephine. She wrote a piece about it for her paper …’
‘I know – I saw it. Your mum sent me the link.’
‘… and then the judge decided to make a big example out of it and give me the maximum sentence. So here I am.’
Once the story was told, neither of them spoke for a while. There was nothing Rachel could do to make things better: nothing she could do at all, at that moment, other than reach across and squeeze Alison’s hand again. Alison didn’t respond at first; and her words, when they came, were slow and faltering.
‘One thing about being in here: you get time to think. Especially during those bloody weekends. I mean, there are only so many episodes of Casualty and Pointless Celebrities you can watch. So I’ve been thinking a lot about Josephine, and why she decided to do that to me.’
Rachel shrugged. ‘To sell papers, I suppose.’
‘Sure. And it’s done her no harm at all – Mum told me she’s got her own column now. Weekly slot. So somebody must have liked it. But you know, why me? I know I ticked all her little hate boxes. Black? Yes. Lesbian? Yes. Disabled? Yes. On benefits? Yes. I was getting Disability Living Allowance, Housing Benefit, all sorts … But what had I actually done, to make her hate me so much?’
‘She’s probably just … fucked up herself. Had a crap childhood or something.’
Alison paused, considering this, and said: ‘I got a lot of letters, after the story ran.’
‘Letters of support, you mean?’
‘A couple of those, but mostly they were … well, horrible. Agreeing with Josephine. Blaming me. I mean, I don’t really think anyone saw the fraud itself as that big a deal, so they weren’t blaming me for what I’d done, so much. It was for … It was for being what I am. Who I am.’ She smiled, took a Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose violently. ‘But there’s not much I can do about that, is there?’
*
If Rachel wanted to know how her day could become more upsetting, she was about to find out, on her journey home.
The train had just pulled into Didcot Parkway, and she was staring out of the window at the towers of the power station, remembering the village of Little Calverton, and the picturebook thatched cottage Laura and Roger had bought there, with their dream of creating an idyllic childhood for their son. And while she was lost in this memory, her phone rang, tugging her out of it. She answered the call: it was Faustina, and she was dreadfully upset, almost unable to speak through her tears.
‘An accident,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘At home.’
It took Rachel a while to realize that by ‘home’ she was referring to the Marshall Islands. It took her even longer to understand what had happened.
‘A bomb? In her garden? Oh Faustina, that’s terrible … unbelievable.’
It seemed that Faustina’s granddaughter, one of her six or seven grandchildren, had been playing in the back garden when she had come across a seventy-year-old hand grenade. These islands had been used as an American military base in the Second World War, as part of the campaign against the Japanese, and there was still, incredibly, a large amount of unexploded ordnance lying around. Faustina’s granddaughter – her second daughter’s daughter, only seven years old – had picked up the grenade and was tossing it around like a tennis ball when it exploded and killed her
instantly.
Rachel’s immediate impulse was to advise Faustina and Jules to fly home at once. Only as an afterthought did she ask: ‘What does Lady Gunn say?’
‘She’s not answering her phone. I think she’s on a plane. New York. She’s gone for two weeks. She’ll organize some charity ball, she said.’
‘Well, I’m sure she’d agree.’
Faustina explained that the journey back home was a long and difficult one, involving at least two changes of plane and stopovers in Seoul or Kuala Lumpar or Manila. Even if they flew out of Heathrow this evening, it would take them about thirty-six hours to get there. The cost was enormous: it would eat up most of their savings. But Rachel could see that they had no choice.
‘And the children,’ Faustina said. ‘Somebody has to look after Grace and Sophia.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Rachel. ‘I can look after them. Really. I mean, it’s just a question of feeding them and making sure they’re clean and putting them to bed. I can do that. Don’t worry about it. You go and pack, Faustina. Get ready and go.’
And indeed, when Rachel got back to the house at five o’clock that evening, the housekeeper and her husband were sitting in the kitchen with their coats on, ready to depart, waiting only for her return. She embraced them both, gave Faustina a kiss pregnant with feeling, then walked with them out through the debris and saw them safely through the hoarding. They trudged off together in the direction of the nearest Piccadilly Line station, holding hands, the weight of their shared suitcase pulling Jules’s body off balance to the left. Rachel went back inside and realized that the house was quieter, vaster and lonelier than ever.
She called Madiana to tell her what had happened. It was lunchtime in New York by now and she seemed to be eating in a noisy restaurant. At the back of Rachel’s mind had been the hope (the absurd hope, she quickly realized) that Madiana herself would come home to look after her children for the next couple of weeks. But she had no intention of doing that. She told Rachel that she trusted her and knew that she could rely on her and she called her an angel and many other borderline-affectionate terms. She told her to make use of both halves of the house for the time being and to treat the place as her own.