by Jonathan Coe
*
Rachel keyed in the code to the magic door on the second-floor landing and passed through the mirror into the haunted, enchanted kingdom that was the Gunns’ living space, a space that was probably big enough to house twenty people but for the moment was home only to two unattended nine-year-old girls.
It was not quite silent on this side of the mirror. The noise of the television was coming from the girls’ playroom.
Rachel found them watching a rerun of Friends together on a satellite comedy channel. One of the female characters was explaining to one of the male characters where all the female erogenous zones were and what was the best way to bring a woman to orgasm. Grace and Sophia were watching with grave, impassive expressions; but then they never did laugh much.
‘I’m sorry I’m late for your lessons today,’ she said. ‘I’ve been to see a friend of mine in the country. Also, as you probably know, Faustina and Jules have had some bad news and they’ve had to go home very suddenly. They’ll probably be gone for about a fortnight.’
Again, it was hard to tell whether this information really affected them in any way. Nothing seemed to get through to them, somehow: even the news that the family dog had been fatally wounded had not seemed to upset them, particularly. The more time she spent with these strange, emotionless girls, the more Rachel felt that she was dealing with two of John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos.
‘I think we’ll forget about work for the moment, anyway, I’ll go down and find something we can have for dinner,’ she said.
Grace nodded and Sophia stuck up her thumb in approval. Rachel withdrew and went downstairs to the main kitchen, thinking to herself that even these little gestures represented a small victory.
*
Although the twins were cooperative and uncomplaining and didn’t argue much either with Rachel or each other, the process of feeding them and making sure they bathed themselves and then reading to them in bed was still surprisingly tiring. Rachel had decided to carry on sleeping in her own bedroom but she made a point of wedging open the doors that connected the two parts of the house, and told the girls that they should come and find her, or call her on the internal phone system, if they got scared or if anything was wrong. It was almost ten o’clock by the time they were both tucked up in bed and sleeping. After that, Rachel found herself unable to settle. She kept climbing up and down the narrow staircase at the back of the house and checking that the doors and windows were locked. Faustina’s sudden departure had really shaken her. That, and the terrible fate of Mortimer. That was two days ago, now. She wondered what Jules had done with the body. She went to her bedroom window, opened it and peered out into the garden. Surely he would not just have left it there? That would be too grisly to contemplate.
No, the canine bundle had definitely gone. A light breeze was beginning to stir and an untethered section of tarpaulin was flapping quite loudly. She hoped that it wouldn’t keep her awake all night. It was a corner of the tarpaulin that covered the pit, or was meant to. It seemed to have come loose.
Then there came another sound from the garden. A loud, metallic clang, as if a bucket had just been knocked over. Was there something out there? In the absence of any other explanation, Rachel had still not discounted her own theory that it was some fearless, oversized urban fox that had entered the garden and attacked Mortimer. She craned her neck further out of the window and squinted towards the rear, ivy-covered wall. It was too dark to see anything for certain but, the more intently she looked, the more she suspected that there was something there, some wild creature, lurking in the deepest shadows.
And then she did see it. It rushed out from the back of the garden, scuttled towards the edge of the pit and disappeared through the hole in the tarpaulin. Its body was black and grossly distended, its movement was unmistakably insectile, and she was convinced that she could even make out the hairs on the last of its eight legs as it dived down into the pit, scrambling down the walls, plunging deeper and deeper into the darkness from which it had come.
15
‘The thing is,’ Rachel said, ‘when I’m sitting here with you, talking like this, everything seems so normal.’
‘Of course it does. Everything is normal.’
‘I know. I imagined it. I’d had a really stressful day, I was incredibly tired … Maybe I even nodded off and dreamed it.’
‘Quite possibly that is the explanation. After all, you’d just seen the picture in the museum, and you’d been looking again at the card from the old pack of cards that your friend gave you all those years ago. So this creature, or something like it, was very much on your mind.’
Rachel and Livia were having coffee together once again at the Lido café in Hyde Park. They had not wanted to give up on the burgeoning friendship just because Mortimer no longer furnished them with a pretext. In fact, more than ever, Rachel valued Livia’s sanity, her smiling good nature, the sense of calm she always radiated with her measured advice and tuneful, cello-like voice.
‘So you don’t think I’m going mad?’ Rachel asked, with a smile that didn’t do much to conceal the sincerity of the question.
‘Of course not. This is such a difficult time for you. You just need to take things easy.’
‘Everything seems to be going wrong at once,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s just one thing after another. My gran phoned this morning. She’d had a letter from Grandad’s oncologist.’
‘Yes? What was the news?’
‘Nothing good. He’d applied to the Cancer Drugs Fund for that drug you mentioned but they turned him down. Too expensive, apparently. Oddly enough, that doesn’t seem to have been a problem for your client – the Duchess or the Baroness or whatever she is.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Livia, ‘I never thought about the expense. Of course, she’s a very wealthy woman and might have paid for it herself. The thing is, I don’t always understand how things work in your country. I’m trying to find out more about it. I thought this book might help me.’
She handed Rachel the book she was currently reading, a thick, faded green hardback with no dustjacket. It was called The Winshaw Legacy, by Michael Owen.
‘I found this in the charity shop,’ she said. ‘The Winshaws are a famous family in Britain, I think. This tells their story. Did you read it?’
Rachel shook her head. ‘Maybe I should. Their name seems to come up everywhere these days. My friend Alison was stitched up by one of them. She was telling me about it just the other day.’
‘Really? By a member of this family? Which one?’
‘Josephine.’
Livia’s eyes narrowed. She had very striking, amber eyes.
‘Oh yes. I know Josephine.’
‘You do?’
‘She lives near here. Not far from the house where you live, in fact. I walk her dog sometimes. But nobody has seen her for a few days.’
‘Taking a well-earned break in Mauritius or somewhere, no doubt.’
‘I don’t think so. The police are looking for her.’ She pressed her copy of the book into Rachel’s hands. ‘Here – borrow it. Please.’
‘Thanks, but I’m not really in the mood for reading at the moment.’
‘No. Take it. You should learn about these people.’
Purely because Livia was being so insistent, Rachel flicked through the pages quickly, automatically, and then put it in her knapsack. ‘OK, I’ll give it a try,’ she said. ‘Thank you. And thanks for trying to help with my grandad. I hate to think of him suffering the way he is.’ She clasped Livia’s hand. ‘You’re a good friend. There aren’t many people like you in
my life at the moment.’
‘And how are things with your boyfriend?’
‘Oh, OK. He’s trying to get a chapter of his thesis finished. He doesn’t seem to have much time to think about anything else right now.’
‘Well, I’m here for you,’ said Livia. ‘And the children, if you want me to take them off your hands for a while.’
Rachel looked directly into her eyes, now, and felt ashamed with herself that instead of seeing – as she should have done – uncomplicated kindness there, she imagined something else instead, something ambiguous, something blank and unreadable. It was symptomatic of the way she was growing needlessly wary of other people. This job was making her cynical and mistrustful. She looked away and sipped her coffee, embarrassed.
*
That afternoon, she picked up Grace and Sophia from school at three thirty as always, and then, as they entered the building site at the front of the house, they found that all the Romanian workers were gathered around the site office, and some sort of crisis meeting was in progress. At the centre of it was Dumitru, the site manager, who seemed to be presenting Tony Blake with an ultimatum. The faces of the other workers were attentive and morose.
‘Come on, you two,’ said Rachel, hurrying the twins up the front steps. ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with us.’
Nonetheless, as soon as she had ushered them through the front door and told them to go upstairs and change out of their uniforms, she went back on to the steps to listen to the argument. But the meeting was already breaking up. Dumitru was still shouting and gesturing angrily as he stripped off his high-visibility jacket, removed his hard hat, and stormed out through the door in the hoarding. The calls from his workmates suggested, to Rachel, that they were asking him to come back, but his decision seemed clear: he was quitting. Tony Blake was staring after him, tight-lipped, and brandishing an empty, clear glass bottle in his hand.
‘Has he resigned, or something?’ she asked a pair of workers who were standing nearby.
‘Yep. He’s gone,’ said the first of them.
‘What was the argument about?’
‘He was drunk.’
‘Well, that’s what Tony says,’ his companion chipped in.
‘You saw the bottle. This morning it was full of vodka.’
‘Do you blame him? Imagine having to do what he’s been doing. Who would lead a crew on a job like this? It’s insane. It’s dangerous. This isn’t a building job, it’s a mining job. Why wouldn’t you start drinking?’
‘Fine, but if it means you start seeing things …’
‘Seeing things?’ repeated Rachel. ‘What sort of things?’
‘Dumitru told Tony that he wouldn’t go down into the pit again. He said he saw something bad, right down at the bottom.’ The man’s companion shook his head in warning, telling him to be quiet, but he continued anyway: ‘Apparently when you get down there, past all the other floors, down to Number 11, there’s a tunnel. They discovered it yesterday. No one had noticed it before. Dumitru went into it and crawled along for a while and saw –’
‘He didn’t see anything. The guy’s a drunkard. Always has been.’
‘What did he see?’ Rachel asked.
‘He doesn’t know what it was, exactly. He was flashing his torch ahead of him and then suddenly, right ahead of him, he saw a pair of eyes. Staring back at him. Staring out of the darkness.’
Rachel felt as if her heart had stopped beating. With an effort she said: ‘Was it a … cat, maybe? Perhaps a dog fell in or something and managed to –’
‘He said it was much bigger than that. Way bigger.’
The man fell silent. Whether he believed the story or not, it was clear that he had no appetite for the work they were now being asked to do at this house. Meanwhile, his companion said simply:
‘Dumitru saw nothing. He was drunk. There’s nothing down there. It’s a big hole in the ground, that’s all.’
16
Rachel was trapped, in effect. However much she hated being in the house at night, she couldn’t leave, because she had been entrusted with the care of the children.
What she really wanted to do was pack her things, take the train north and visit Grandad in the hospice again. By all accounts he was getting weaker and weaker and she hated the thought that she might not see him again before the cancer finally claimed him. But she couldn’t move. She had to stay where she was, to watch over them, to keep guard.One night, unable to sleep, she rose from her bed at about two o’clock and sat down at the little desk overlooking the garden. As always – as she did every few minutes, during her waking hours – she looked out into the dark to see if she could see any movement around the edges of the pit, but there was nothing. The workmen had tied the tarpaulin down even more securely than before.
Turning on her desklight, she took two objects out of the topmost drawer. One was the expensive, linen-covered notebook from Venice that Lucas had bought her, as a thank-you for her help with his Oxford interview. The other was the Pelmanism card that Phoebe had given her in the summer of 2003: the drawing of a lurid giant spider that so mysteriously resembled the work of Josep Baqué. She stared at the picture for a few minutes, as she had stared at it so often, so wonderingly and so uneasily, during the last ten years. Then she opened the notebook and began to write.
*
The paradox is this: I have to assume, for the sake of my sanity, that I am going mad.
Because what’s the alternative? The alternative is to believe that the thing I saw the other night was real. And if I allowed myself to believe that, surely the horror of it would also make me lose my mind. In other words, I’m trapped. Trapped between two choices, two paths, both of which lead to insanity.
It’s the quiet. The silence, and the emptiness. That’s what has brought me to this point. I never would have imagined that, in the very midst of a city as big as this, there could be a house enfolded in such silence. For weeks, of course, I’ve been having to put up with the sound of the men working outside, underground, digging, digging, digging. But that has almost finished now, and at night, after they have gone home, the silence descends. And that’s when my imagination takes over (it is only my imagination, I have to cling to that thought), and in the darkness and the silence, I’m starting to think that I can hear things: other noises. Scratches, rustles. Movements in the bowels of the earth. As for what I saw the other night, it was a fleeting apparition, just a few seconds, some disturbance of the deep shadows at the very back of the garden, and then a clearer vision of the thing itself, the creature, but it cannot have been real. This vision cannot have been anything but a memory, come back to haunt me, and that’s why I’ve decided to revisit that memory now, to see what I can learn from it, to understand the message that it holds.
Also, I’m taking up my pen for another good reason, quite an ordinary reason, and that’s because I’m bored, and it is this boredom – surely, this boredom and nothing else – that has been driving me crazy, provoking these silly delusions. I need a task, an occupation (of course, I thought I would find that by working for this family, but it has been a strange job so far, quite different from my expectations). And I’ve decided that this task will be to write something. I’ve not tried to write anything serious since my first year at Oxford, even though Laura, just before she left, told me that I should carry on with my writing, that she liked it, that she thought I had talent. Which meant so much, coming from her. It meant everything.
Laura told me, as well, that it was very important to be organized when you write. That you should sta
rt at the beginning and tell everything in sequence. Just as she did, I suppose, when she told me the story of her husband and the Crystal Garden. But so far, I don’t seem to be following her advice very well.
All right, then. I shall put an end to this rambling, and attempt to set down the story of my second visit to Beverley to stay with my grandparents, in the summer of 2003. A visit I made not with my brother this time but with Alison, my dear friend Alison, who at last after so many years’ mysterious distance I have found again, picking up the threads of our precious friendship. This is our story, really, the story of how we first became close, before strange – not to say ridiculous – forces intervened and drove us apart. And it’s also the story of –
But no, I mustn’t say too much just yet. Let’s go back to the very beginning.
*
Rachel stayed up most of that night writing the first few sections of her memoir. She felt tired in the morning, but also strangely refreshed and energized. After giving the girls breakfast and walking with them to school, she lay down for a short nap and then started working again. She wrote throughout the day, without interruptions. Outside, all was quiet. There was no sign of Mr Blake or the Romanian crew: she imagined that work had been suspended until a new site manager had been appointed. At three thirty, she picked the girls up from school again, and for the rest of the evening, again, she didn’t give them any extra lessons or ask them to do any homework. This time, being more practised at it, she was able to get them into bed more quickly and with less fuss. By nine o’clock she was at her desk once again. Looking back across the years, remembering the youthful friendship between Alison and herself, picturing the Beverley Westwood in summer sunshine, trying to evoke the love between her grandparents when they were both still in good health, she managed to escape the feeling of dread which she knew would otherwise envelope her if she had nothing to concentrate upon except the stillness of this house and the shapeless terrors which haunted its ruined garden.