Madiana entered the room accompanied by a large and beautiful golden retriever, who proceeded to sniff at Rachel’s legs curiously and lick her on the hand. Madiana grabbed the dog by the collar and gave him a reproving slap.
‘All right, Mortimer, that’s enough,’ she said. The dog sat down beside her, panting but clearly chastened. Madiana greeted Rachel courteously but without warmth, and then proceeded to explain her business: she had decided to take on a live-in tutor for the twins, who were in Year 4 at the local prep school. She wanted them to do extra reading, extra maths, and to start learning French, Latin, Russian and Mandarin.
‘You will live in this house,’ she said. ‘Faustina brings the girls back from school at three thirty. They will rest and have a snack and then you will teach them from four o’clock until seven o’clock. The rest of the time is your own.’
‘What about Lucas?’
The subject of Lucas, clearly, did not interest Madiana as much as her own daughters did. ‘He’s back at school,’ she said. ‘Some weekends he will come home. When he does, you must carry on with whatever you were doing with him before. You know what you will be paid, yes? I mean, it’s all agreed with the agency.’
‘Yes,’ said Rachel.
‘So, you agree?’
It seemed that an instant decision was expected. In fact, it wasn’t a difficult one to make.
‘Yes. Of course. Thank you very much.’
‘Come with me. I’ll show you where you will live.’
Cautioning the dog to stay where he was, Madiana led Rachel into the hallway and up the main staircase. (It was one of the very few times she would ever use it.) The two girls, Grace and Sophia, lived mainly on the second floor of the house. They had a bedroom each, a shared bathroom, a study room and a large playroom equipped with everything from a table-tennis table to two PlayStation controllers and a monitor which took up most of the largest wall.
‘What a lovely room for them to play in,’ said Rachel.
‘It is not big enough,’ said Madiana, dismissively. ‘We are making them a bigger one downstairs, once these ridiculous arguments are resolved.’
She did not specify what these arguments were about or who they were with, and Rachel did not feel bold enough to ask. Doubtless all would become clear.
‘This is the door,’ said Madiana, indicating a white-panelled door in the wall of the landing, ‘that leads to your part of the house.’
Rachel was only half listening. Passing the girls’ bathroom, she noticed that the walls and ceiling were painted with gold leaf, and standing at the centre was an extraordinary item of furniture: a small roll-top bath, but not just any bath – it appeared to be a diamanté bath – studded all over with fake diamonds. At least she assumed (or rather hoped) that they were fake. In any case, she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.
‘You are listening?’ said Madiana.
‘Yes, of course.’
Her new employer ushered her through the door. It led to another small landing, with narrow stairs leading both up and down. Madiana closed the door behind them and Rachel noticed that, on this side, the door was completely concealed by a full-length, gilt-framed mirror, and was also equipped with a keypad.
‘You need a code to open the door from this side,’ said Madiana. ‘I will give it to you later. Down there,’ she added, pointing down the stairs, ‘is the kitchen. Where you will eat. Now, follow me.’
They climbed two more flights until they had almost reached the very top of the house. There were three doors leading off the top landing.
‘Faustina and her husband sleep in here,’ said Madiana, indicating the middle door. ‘This one is the bathroom you will share with them. And this is where you will sleep.’
She led Rachel into a small but cosy bedroom with a sloping roof, fireplace and compact built-in wardrobe. There was just enough room for an armchair and a tiny desk which overlooked the back garden. Rachel peered through the window and was surprised to find how high the house was. She was surprised, too, to find that there was no garden as such, at the moment: just a continuation of the building site, a mess of mud and temporary planking with a square of tarpaulin laid out at the centre, covering what seemed to be a gigantic hole. Parked in a far corner, but still dominating the scene by virtue of its height, there stood some sort of piling rig. In the midst of this desolation, Mortimer was running around sniffing objects hopefully and cocking his leg against some of them, while being watched over by a dark-haired man smoking a cigarette. Both figures seemed very distant and small.
‘That is Jules,’ said Madiana. ‘He does the gardening, drives the cars, things like that.’
‘He’s married to Faustina?’ said Rachel.
‘Yes. You will eat your meals with them, down in the kitchen. The staff side of the house and the family side of the house are quite separate. There are doors which connect them, but the only one you will be able to use is the door with the mirror.’
‘Right,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ll remember that.’
‘Good. But you will not even use that door,’ said Madiana, ‘unless you are invited.’
5
And so Rachel’s new life began.
Her routine, at first, was simple, and her duties undemanding. She would spend a few hours every morning in her bedroom taking an online course in Russian, and the same in the afternoon for Mandarin. In this way, at least, she hoped to stay at least one day ahead of her pupils. Then at four o’clock she would go down to the mirrored door on the second floor, key in her four-digit code, pass through into the enchanted kingdom of the Gunns’ living space, and wait for the girls in their study room. Together they would work and talk for the best part of three hours, after which Grace and Sophia would go downstairs for their dinner, and Rachel would return to her bedroom. After an hour’s rest, she would descend the narrow stairs again, all the way to the lower ground floor and the staff kitchen at the back of the house. There she would eat dinner with Faustina and her husband, and afterwards either stay to watch television with them, or go back upstairs to read or go online, or sometimes smarten herself up and venture outside for the evening.
The house was extremely large, and its layout was elaborate. As Madiana had told her, the staff and family living quarters were entirely separate. There were two kitchens: a small one at the back of the house, where the staff would cook for themselves, and a large one at the front, where Faustina would also prepare meals for the children and – very occasionally – for Sir Gilbert, his wife and their guests. There was a connecting door between the two kitchens, but only Faustina knew the code that would open it. Another door from the staff kitchen led to a long cloakroom, at the end of which was a further locked door. Only Jules knew the code to this one, because it opened on to a staircase which descended to the garage in the basement. Here, in normal circumstances, the Gunns would keep their four cars: a Range Rover, a Rolls-Royce, a Lamborghini and a 1953 Bentley R-Type Continental. When one of these cars was needed, Jules was supposed to drive it on to a platform in the corner of the garage which would rise up on a hydraulic lift and emerge at ground level in front of the house. Unfortunately while the building works were in progress this was impossible, and so for the time being the cars were being stored elsewhere, and Sir Gilbert and Madiana had to make do with a Mercedes-AMG which they had bought specially to tide them over for these few months and which they kept in a small additional garage two streets away: a garage which was itself valued at just under half a million pounds.
These building works were the source of the ‘arguments’ to which Madiana had alluded when
showing Rachel around the house. For some time Madiana had been insisting to her husband that their London house (one of six that they owned around the world) was not big enough to meet the family’s needs. She wished to extend: but the absurd local planning regulations dictated that they could not make the house any taller, nor could they extend it at the rear, into the back garden. The only way to go, in other words, was down.
Many other households in the area had reached similar conclusions, and so ever more extensive and elaborate basement conversions had become popular among the wealthier residents of Chelsea over the last few years. The works they entailed were exceptionally noisy and disruptive, but people more or less tolerated them, largely for the reason that, one day soon, they might want to do the same thing themselves. Serious objections were only raised, for the most part, when the works threatened to do structural damage to the neighbouring houses: and this, indeed, was what had happened in the Gunns’ case. A formal complaint had been lodged by the residents of the next house in the street (Number 15), claiming that since the Gunns had started digging out their basement, cracks had appeared in some of the supporting walls of their own property. The council had ordered that works should be suspended while the matter was resolved, and Madiana, who had grandiose plans for these subterranean floors, was beside herself with anger.
According to Jules and Faustina, however, there was also a much graver issue at stake. They told Rachel that the works had been shut down, not because of objections from the neighbours, but because of an accident on site. Details were sketchy, but it seemed that one of the builders had been at the very base of the shaft (then dug to about seventy feet) when a steel girder being lowered into place to complete the box frame had fallen from its cable and struck him.
‘That sounds nasty,’ said Rachel. ‘Was he OK?’
Jules shook his head. ‘He died. That was when Health and Safety closed the whole thing down.’
Rachel shuddered. She had a long-standing fear of underground spaces, and felt distinctly uneasy at the thought that, beneath the elegant, comfortable rooms of the Gunns’ house, a matter of mere feet from the kitchen she used every day, there yawned this pit, this fathomless void. It seemed incredible that the only thing preventing the house itself from collapsing into it was a fragile frame of steel rods and girders. She tried to block the idea from her mind.
Rachel did not see much of the girls at weekends. If Madiana and Sir Gilbert were out of the country, the twins were sometimes flown out to join them. Occasionally Jules would have to drive them to the Cotswolds, where the Gunns kept a ‘cottage’: actually a cluster of converted farm buildings, including a swimming pool and sauna complex which was itself twice as big as most people’s houses. Mortimer, the golden retriever, would sometimes go with them to the cottage, although now and again they forgot to take him. The London house was never lively at the best of times: at the weekends, when only Rachel, the housekeeper and her husband were in residence, and the building works at all the neighbouring houses were suspended, it could be chillingly silent.
*
One lunchtime, after she had been living in the Gunns’ house for a few weeks, Rachel was downstairs in the staff kitchen, watching the television. She had made herself a sandwich and was feeding scraps of cold chicken to Mortimer, who sat at her feet, tired but content after returning from his walk with Livia, the smiling, pensive Romanian dog-walker who called at the property every day to give him his exercise.
Rachel was watching the lunchtime news, without paying it much attention. Currently there was an item about the construction of Crossrail, the big new transport project designed to connect the City of London with the outermost eastern and western suburbs, entailing a number of deep excavations across the capital which were (not unlike the Gunns’ basement works) creating a lot of inconvenience for many Londoners. The report today came from Liverpool Street station, where it seemed that the construction workers had made a ghoulish discovery: twenty-five human skeletons, probably dating back to the fourteenth century and providing evidence that the current works might be taking place on the site of a burial ground for victims of the Black Death.
And then Rachel had a surprise: a nice one. The academic expert they had brought in to talk about the find was Laura Harvey, her old tutor from Oxford. She was smartly dressed in a grey pinstriped jacket over an open-necked white blouse, was wearing her hair shorter than before, and looked thoroughly glamorous and composed.
‘So, Professor Harvey,’ the newsreader was saying, ‘you think that this discovery may not just be of historical value, but worth something in monetary terms as well?’
‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘Of course I’m not talking about the market value of the remains if people were to try and sell them. I’m saying that discoveries like this add to the sense of mystery which attaches to parts of London, and that sense of mystery is one of the things that attracts people here.’
‘Tourists, you mean.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re part of a movement, I believe, which is tasked with the job of assigning value to phenomena such as this?’
‘That’s right. As members of the Institute for Quality Valuation, we attempt to quantify things that have traditionally been thought of as unquantifiable. Feelings, in other words. A sense of awe, a sense of wonder, even fear – in fact, fear in particular. Look how popular the London Dungeon is.’
‘Monetizing Wonder was the title of your book on this subject, wasn’t it? But that was mainly a book about films.’
‘Well, London has been the setting for countless films, and the stories which filmmakers have framed around these settings are among the things which draw people here. What’s been uncovered at Liverpool Street today, for instance, is strongly reminiscent of a number of famous London films. I’m thinking of Quatermass and the Pit, from the 1960s, in which a construction crew digging a new tube line unearths a human skeleton, among other things; or Death Line, made a few years later, in which a disused Underground station turns out to be housing a colony of cannibals. It doesn’t matter whether people have actually seen these films or not: collectively, they are part of our consciousness. They tell us something important about London, which is that we’re never quite sure what lies underneath us, beneath our feet. There is always the sense that if we dig too deeply beneath London’s surface, we might uncover something sinister, something nasty. People find this a frightening idea, of course, but also rather an exciting one.’
‘Finally, Dr Harvey, would you care to put a value – a monetary value – on today’s discovery at Liverpool Street?’
‘Yes, of course. We’ve developed an algorithm to produce quick and very rough estimates for this sort of thing, taking into account all the historical, cultural and literary factors, and we estimate that the discovery of these human remains today probably adds about £1.2 million to the value of London as a whole.’
‘Fascinating stuff. Professor Laura Harvey, thank you very much. And now – how should we cope with the problem of trained jihadists returning to the UK? We take a look at Denmark, where they are experimenting with a very different approach to this question …’
6
‘It’s wonderful to see you again, Rachel,’ Laura said. ‘Thank you so much for getting back in touch.’
‘I should have done it ages ago,’ said Rachel. ‘But I wasn’t sure where you were working any more. It was such a shock, seeing you on the TV …’
‘Well, I’m a bit embarrassed about that.’
‘Why? I thought you came across incredibly well. So confident and articulate.’
‘Yes, but
… this new public role I seem to be acquiring. I feel very ambivalent about it.’
She stirred her cappuccino and took a tentative sip. They were sitting in the Housman Room, the senior common room at University College, London, on a quiet Thursday morning with not many other lecturers or research students for company. It was a bright and cheerful space, with colourful modernist abstracts hanging on the walls and autumn sunlight pooling in through a glass cupola. Sinking back into one of the comfortable leather armchairs, Laura looked thoroughly at home there. She had been on the staff at UCL for two years now, her job title – Professor of Contemporary Thought – testifying to the fact that she had started to expand her academic horizons since teaching Rachel at Oxford.
‘Basically,’ she said, ‘I’ve done a deal with the devil. The devil in this case being Lord Lucrum. He was Master of our college, remember?’
‘Of course. Is he not any more?’
‘No. He left a few months ago, to spend more time with his committees. One of which, much to my amazement, he asked me to join. He’d actually read my book – or got someone to read it for him. Pretty surprising, in either case, since I never thought that a book of essays about obscure British films would interest anyone other than the occasional fanatic like my late husband. But I think it was the title that caught his fancy, more than anything else.’
‘Is this to do with that institution you mentioned in the interview …?’
‘That’s right. The Institute for Quality Valuation – of which he’s the director. Sounds pretty innocuous, doesn’t it?’
‘Is it not?’
‘It goes back,’ said Laura, ‘to the 1980s, when Henry Winshaw was chairing a Review Board on the NHS. The idea was to privatize it, essentially, although of course nobody was going to admit that straight out. But he had this one big idea, which was that quality of human life could be valued. Priced, to use the more accurate word. So that some medical interventions are more cost-effective than others. Lord Lucrum – or David Lucrum as he was called in those days – was a relatively lowly management consultant who was part of that review. He worshipped Henry Winshaw – idolized him – and nowadays people see him as some sort of spiritual heir. He’s still an adviser to the government on NHS reforms. As for this new institute, it’s part of the same move to express everything in monetary terms. They want people like me – arts and humanities people – to come on board and be part of the process.’