Number 11

by Jonathan Coe

  The guides dispersed, looking tired but still cheerful. Sir Gilbert, his wife and their children did not, on the other hand, seem especially invigorated by their day’s activities.

  ‘Not at all. Thank you for coming,’ said Sir Gilbert, giving her hand the briefest of shakes. ‘Excuse me while I go and freshen up.’

  ‘Was the safari good?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘There were no lions,’ said Madiana, brushing past her, and addressing the remark more to her husband than to anybody else. ‘For the third time, no lions.’

  ‘You can’t just lay lions on on tap, you know,’ said Sir Gilbert, heading for his tent without looking back. ‘We saw bloody rhinos and elephants, for God’s sake. What more do you want?’

  ‘They want lions, obviously,’ said Lucas, the teenager, in a weary voice as he made for a different tent. Madiana and the two girls – who looked hot and disgruntled – trudged towards a third tent, the one nearest the swimming pool: this meant, Rachel realized, that Sir Gilbert’s family and entourage accounted for four out of the six tents in camp. She later found out that the other two were empty, and that he had actually booked the entire camp for the week.

  ‘Come and see me in fifteen minutes,’ he called back to her. ‘We’ll have a drink and I’ll tell you what I want.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Rachel, and returned briefly to her own quarters.

  Dusk was falling as she made her way to Sir Gilbert’s tent fifteen minutes later. A slow, magnificent sunset was in progress, with a shimmering ochre sun casting valedictory rays through the canopy of trees, while the cicadas sang and the night birds began their early chorus. Sir Gilbert was drinking a gin and tonic at his table and seemed to be enjoying the sunset, although, as Rachel was to learn over the next few months, he was not much given to revealing his emotions.

  ‘Not a bad spot,’ was all he said to her.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Been here before?’

  ‘No. This is very much a first, for me.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have been my first choice,’ he said. ‘But the kids wanted to see some animals and, you know … They take priority.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘So,’ he said, after summoning the butler and ordering a glass of white wine for Rachel, ‘about my son. When he’s not at school he mostly lives with his mother, so I don’t take much responsibility for how he’s turned out.’

  ‘Which school does he go to?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Eton. Just starting his last year there, which means he’s got university interviews coming up in a few months. He’s aiming for maths at Oxford. You were at Oxford, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you didn’t go to public school?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. That’s what they told me. Well, the crux of the matter is this. Because of the cock-eyed ideology which permeates education in Britain at the moment, Oxford colleges are under a lot of pressure to favour state-educated pupils like yourself. I believe it’s called “inclusivity”. Or “anti-elitism”. Whatever you call it, the upshot is that boys like Lucas, who’s never seen the inside of a state school in his life, have to try extra hard to make the right impression. His mother’s spoiled him. I don’t believe I’ve spoiled him, but I’ve certainly spent a lot of money on him over the last seventeen years, which I think is only natural when it comes to your own offspring. Not surprisingly, he’s turned out cocky, arrogant and with a sense of entitlement you can spot from ten miles away. None of which would have been a problem, in the past, but nowadays, as I said, this sort of thing apparently puts people’s backs up at our great centres of learning. So what we’ve got to do is try to knock some of it out of him. Do you follow?’

  ‘Sort of …’ Rachel said, although there was no mistaking the note of uncertainty in her voice.

  ‘Well, I’ll put it as simply as I can,’ said Sir Gilbert. ‘I want you to turn my son into a normal person.’

  Rachel would have considered this a bizarre request at the best of times. Here, disorientated after her long journey, she thought it stranger than ever, and for a moment she found herself wondering if she had somehow passed through a looking glass in the last twenty-four hours, and emerged into a parallel world where the everyday rules and assumptions had been inverted.

  ‘A normal person?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes. I want him to be able to open his mouth without it sounding as though he thinks he owns the world and everything in it.’

  Rachel took a deep breath. ‘OK then. I’ll … see what I can do about that.’

  ‘You have a very strong accent,’ said Sir Gilbert. ‘What is it, Lancashire?’

  ‘Yorkshire. You don’t want me to give him a Yorkshire accent, do you?’

  ‘No. I don’t really care what you do to him. Talk to him, read to him, whatever it takes. You can start tomorrow at nine. Spend the day with him and see what you can manage.’

  With that, he picked up his iPad and began reading a magazine article. Rachel realized that this was his way of telling her the conversation was at an end.

  *

  The next morning, Lucas did not go on safari with the others. Nor did his father. Rachel imagined, at first, that Sir Gilbert wanted to stay behind to keep a watchful eye on their tutorial, but it turned out that this was not the case at all. He took no notice of them, and confined himself to his tent, where he busied himself with his iPad, a slim leather briefcase full of documents and a number of phone calls. (While mobile reception was non-existent for Rachel, Sir Gilbert had brought along what seemed to be some sort of military satellite phone – a chunky piece of kit complete with retractable aerial – and he spent a good deal of the morning talking on it.)

  Rachel quite enjoyed her morning talking to Lucas. She had encountered a number of Etonians at Oxford, and although they came, of course, in very different forms, she knew that there was one thing they all had in common: a tremendous air of confidence. This confidence, she had always felt, was a wonderful asset: what a great feeling it must be, to know that your wealth and education would not just insulate you against some of the worst of the world’s hardships, but prepare you for a life in which your destiny, handed down as if by birthright, was to control the lives of others. But it was hardly surprising that this confidence, nurtured and encouraged by fierce parental ambition, could easily turn to unbearable arrogance, and this was no doubt what Sir Gilbert feared in his son’s case.

  In fact, after a few hours’ conversation, she had the impression that Lucas was not so much arrogant as depressed. Maths was not his own choice of university subject, it seemed. His real passion was Classical Civilization, but ‘Mum vetoed that,’ he told her. ‘She says it’s a Mickey Mouse subject.’ Maths, it had been decided instead, would better prepare him for the job in the City for which his whole education had, up until this point, been a mere laying of the groundwork. Rachel decided that what he really needed was a training in interview technique: every question that she asked him, about art, about drama (another passion), about books, about politics, produced not a thoughtful or reflective answer, but some boastful comeback about the prize he had won for an essay, or the top marks he had been given for his coursework, or the speech he had made that had won a standing ovation, or the famous author whose children he’d been on holiday with. Every reflex in his brain seemed to be geared towards competition and one-upmanship. None of this, Rachel thought, was exactly his fault, and she only really lost patience with him once, when he told her that failing to get into Oxford would be a personal disaster because it would mean ‘I might end up at some Mickey Mou
se university with a lot of chavs’. At which point she proposed that they break for lunch.

  Shortly before noon – presumably having taken the same flight that had brought Rachel to Skukuza the day before – another guest arrived. He ate lunch with Lucas and Sir Gilbert, while Rachel was seemingly expected to eat by herself, at her own table on the decking of her own tent, but when the meal was over, the new arrival made a point of coming over to introduce himself.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, stretching out the word in what Rachel could only assume was intended to be a flirtatious manner. ‘And who have we here?’

  ‘My name’s Rachel,’ she said. ‘I’m here to do some tutoring for Sir Gilbert and his family.’

  ‘Francis,’ said the man, returning the handshake. ‘Frederick Francis. My friends call me Freddie.’

  He was in his mid-forties, Rachel would have guessed. Fit and well preserved. Slight traces of grey around the temples were really his only signs of middle age. He was not unattractive, by any means, but there was something about him, something indefinable, which made her immediately want to recoil.

  ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘New to the family, I mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘I arrived yesterday.’

  ‘Staying long?’

  ‘I’m not really sure,’ she replied, laughing. ‘That hasn’t been made clear.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Sir Gilbert likes to preserve the element of surprise.’

  Not fully understanding this, and wanting to fill the void of silence that followed, Rachel asked: ‘So, have you been allocated your tent?’

  ‘Sadly, no,’ he answered. ‘I’m going back to London on this evening’s flight.’

  ‘Wow.’ Rachel was – not for the first time in the last two days – astonished. ‘That’s a long way to come, just for the afternoon.’

  ‘Well, Sir Gilbert won’t be in London again for a while, and I’ve got some things he needs to sign. They’re rather urgent.’

  ‘Ah. I see,’ said Rachel, although she very much didn’t. ‘You work for Sir Gilbert, then, do you?’

  Freddie pretended, at least, to give this question serious thought. ‘Now that’s a tricky one. Do I work for him? Or do I work for myself? Or does he work for me?’

  Rachel wasn’t interested in riddles right now. ‘What line of business are you in?’ she asked, directly.

  ‘Before I go,’ said Freddie, ‘I’ll give you my card.’

  But he was either lying, or he forgot, and when he departed the camp that afternoon at 4.30, Mr Francis left her not with a business card but with a long, appraising look from the window of the Land Rover, and an inexplicably uneasy feeling in her gut.

  *

  As it happened, Rachel and the rest of the family were not long in following Mr Francis back to the airport in Johannesburg. That evening at six o’clock, Madiana and the twins arrived back from their latest safari, and Lady Gunn was more contemptuous of the guide’s endeavours than ever.

  ‘Gilbert, darling,’ she said, as the twins ran into the tent to change into their swimming costumes, ‘we are absolutely wasting our time here. There are no lions in this park, none at all. All we saw today were those stupid elephants again.’

  ‘I told you – I can provide you with most things. But not lions, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Then I seriously think we might as well pack up and go home.’

  And the next day, that was exactly what they did. They packed up early in the morning: Madiana, Rachel and the children flew back to London, and Sir Gilbert took a plane to Singapore, although whether that was his final destination was anybody’s guess. Madiana did not seem to know or even particularly care where he was off to. This was one of the many things that puzzled Rachel, as she mulled over the trip during the eleven-hour flight home. She had much to think about on that flight: these last few days had been among the most mysterious of her life, after all. But amidst the dense tangle of her thoughts, the image that recurred to her most often, strangely enough, was a view of the camp itself: booked out for the rest of the week by Sir Gilbert and his family, but now defined, instead, by their absence: the swimming pool unused, the bar and restaurant deserted, the staff redundant, the very tents themselves standing empty and purposeless in the grey shade of the jackalberry trees.

  4

  When Rachel returned home, she found that a lot had been happening at her grandparents’ house. Tests had shown up a large cancerous tumour in her grandfather’s colon. He had been booked into theatre as soon as the discovery was made, and after a six-hour operation the tumour was successfully removed. But the cancer had already mestastasized to his liver, and could no longer be cured through surgery or radiotherapy or chemotherapy, the doctors said: it could only be ‘managed’. They refused to give a prognosis, but the family all knew that cancer of the liver usually comes with a life expectancy of only a few months. For the time being, Grandad would have to remain in hospital: it would take him at least two weeks to recover from the operation.

  The next day, Rachel dropped her mother off at court and then drove out to Beverley by herself. As soon as she arrived, her grandmother took her in a crooked, bony embrace, weeping quietly. Afterwards, Gran made some cheese sandwiches and they had lunch together in the garden. Rachel looked at the plum tree, still bearing a few bunches of overripe fruit, and thought about the gentle, sorrowful message that had been passed on to her by the wind whispering through its branches. She thought, too, about that camp of six magnificent tents grouped around the swimming pool in the Kruger national park, and found it hard to believe that it existed, let alone that she had been there herself just a few days ago.

  She hugged her grandmother tighter than ever when she said goodbye. And then, the next morning, she received another phone call from Albion Tutors.

  ‘You were a big hit with Sir Gilbert and his family,’ Mr Campion told her, to her surprise. ‘Lady Gunn wants to see you tomorrow. You may be looking at a more permanent post.’

  So, once again, Rachel took the train down from Leeds to London. She took the Piccadilly Line to South Kensington and then, after a few minutes’ walk, found herself entering a part of the city where the houses were tall and wide, with polished steps leading up to porticoed entrances, and full-length sash windows looked out over streets which once, she imagined, would have been hushed and cloistered.

  Not any more, however. The Gunns’ house was located in a broad avenue called Turngreet Road, and when Rachel walked into it she was confronted by a scene more reminiscent of a building site than a residential backwater. At least half of the houses in the street seemed to be undergoing major reconstruction. There were high, solid, impenetrable hoardings around their front gardens, all emblazoned with the logos of building firms with names like Talisman Construction, Prestige Basements and Vanguard Redesign. Instead of artisans chipping away at brickwork or giving doorframes a delicate lick of paint, there were gigantic cement mixers grinding away deafeningly, huge skips full of bricks and aggregate being transported on industrial hoists, fifty-foot cranes blocking the carriageway while they hauled their massive loads of girders and breezeblocks from one place to another. Yellow signs along the side of the road indicated a series of parking suspensions whereby residents’ bays had been blocked out for months at a time. Gingerly, Rachel picked her way through all this activity, nodding hello to the groups of men standing around at each of the sites, wearing hard hats and high-visibility jackets and holding low-voiced conversations in Eastern European languages. They returned her greetings with impassive stares.

  Finally she arrived at what seemed to be
the Gunns’ house: Number 13. Like the others, it had a tall hoarding around it. This one was green, and bore the logo of Grierson Basements plc. In the centre of the hoarding was a temporary front door complete with letterbox and alarm system. Rachel had been given a phone number to dial when she reached the house. While she was waiting for the call to be answered she read the warning sign on the hoarding: ‘Under the Health and Safety Act 1974 all persons entering this site must comply with all regulations under this act. All visitors must report to the site office and obtain permission to proceed on to the site or any work area. Safety signs and procedures must be observed and personal protection and safety equipment must be used at all times.’ Another sign simply said: ‘No unauthorized entry’. She began to feel that putting on her smartest work clothes may have been a mistake.

  A voice at the other end of the line, with a slight foreign – perhaps Far Eastern? – accent, said: ‘Miss Wells?’, at which precise moment a pneumatic drill started up behind one of the nearby hoardings, making conversation all but impossible. ‘Yes?’ Rachel shouted into the phone, and then the voice said something indistinct and the call ended. While she was wondering what to do, and whether she was expected to dial again, the temporary green door was pulled open and the welcoming face of a housemaid appeared. Her skin was dark brown, her hair thick, black and wiry, but Rachel could not be sure of her ethnic origin.

  ‘Miss Wells? Please, come in. She is waiting for you.’

  Following the maid, Rachel weaved her way past a toilet cubicle and a temporary site office, towards the front stairs of the house. She could not help noticing that the site was deserted and appeared to have been abandoned some time ago. Then they were up the stairs and had gained the sanctuary of the hallway, where calm, for the moment, seemed to reign.

  Rachel was shown into a sitting room – or, as she supposed one should call it, a drawing room – which ran the length of the house. Bookshelves lined the walls and by the window at the far end stood a grand piano with an album of Chopin mazurkas standing open on the music stand. Everything looked pristine; almost untouched.