‘I wouldn’t have thought,’ Rachel said, choosing her words carefully, ‘you’d feel all that comfortable sitting around a table with that lot.’
‘I know what you mean, but I’m trying to see it from a different point of view. We’re dealing with people who have no notion at all that something is important unless you can put a price on it. So, rather than have them dismiss … well, human emotion, altogether, as something completely worthless, I think it’s better if someone like me comes along and tries to help them out. Makes some sort of case for the defence. So we’ve coined a new term – “hedonic value”. That might refer to, say, the feeling you get when you look at a beautiful stretch of coastline. And we try to prove that this feeling is actually worth a few thousand pounds; or, on the other hand, that a widow’s grief might come at a cost of £10,000 a year to the economy. This way, you see, at least they’ll recognize these feelings. At least they’ll acknowledge their existence.’
Rachel thought about this, and said: ‘You know what I’m starting to think? I’m starting to realize that there are people around us who look normal from the outside, but when you start to understand what makes them tick, you see that they’re not like the rest of us at all. They’re like androids, or zombies or something …’
‘Ah, yes. They walk among us …’ Laura looked up to say hello to a young man who was walking past them on his way to fetch a coffee. ‘Jamie! Are you coming to join us?’
‘Erm … sure. Would that be OK? I don’t want to interrupt.’
‘Not at all. Come on over.’
While Jamie was getting his coffee, she explained: ‘One of my PhD students. Very bright guy. And an absolute sweetheart to boot. The two of you should definitely meet.’
Rachel started to tell Laura about her new job: the sudden phone call, the bewildering transition from Leeds to a South African safari park, the absurd opulence of her new home, the Sisyphean task of ridding Lucas of his arrogance, her own difficult, developing relationship with Grace and Sophia, the Gunns’ glacially composed twin daughters. Jamie came to join them in the middle of her description and, like Laura, appeared intrigued by this insight into the otherwise unglimpsable milieu of the super-rich.
‘So, how do they treat you?’ he wanted to know. ‘Like an equal, or like a member of staff?’
Rachel hesitated. Not only was this a difficult question to answer, but she had just noticed something about Jamie: he was distractingly good-looking. ‘A bit of both, I suppose,’ she said, bringing her thoughts into focus with an effort. ‘Obviously I’m not a person they’d ever have spoken to, normally, but somehow, I don’t know, there seems to be some sort of weird … respect going on.’
‘But you probably represent something very precious to them,’ said Laura. ‘You went to Oxford. You say this woman grew up in Kazakhstan and used to be a model. So, now she finds herself trying to make her way in British society, right at the top. She’s got most of the stuff that money can buy, but you represent all sorts of other things, intangible, desirable things: tradition, culture, privilege, history. I mean, I doubt if that’s how you feel about yourself, but that’s probably how you seem to her. It’s like Lord Lucrum and his committee: she sees something that exists outside the marketplace, and the only way she knows how to react is by putting a price on it. A British education – a certain sort of British education – is one of our few remaining national assets, and like everything else we’re ready to flog it off to the richest buyer. I’ve seen plenty of that happening in my line of work over the last few years, believe me.’
‘I feel,’ Rachel said, ‘that there’s my world, and there’s their world, and the two co-exist, and are very close to each other, but you can’t really pass from one to the other.’ She smiled. ‘Unless you use the magic door, of course.’
‘What magic door?’ asked Jamie.
‘Well, that’s what I call it. It’s the only way I can get from my side of the house to theirs. It looks like a big mirror. A mirror you can pass through.’
‘Like Orphée,’ said Laura, ‘in Cocteau’s film.’
Neither Rachel nor Jamie understood the reference. Laura had to explain that in Cocteau’s reimagining of the Orpheus legend, the poet was able to make his way into the underworld by passing through a mirror which turned to liquid when he stepped into it. It struck her as typical that neither of them had seen a film made in 1950 which, until recently, had been considered famous.
‘I know what Roger would have thought about that,’ she said. ‘You don’t bother to watch these great old films because you have too much choice. In the old days you would have watched them because there was nothing else on the television and nothing else to do.’
‘How’s Harry?’ Rachel asked, reminded of Laura’s family life by this mention of her husband.
‘He’s fine,’ said Laura. ‘Doing well at his new school.’ The reply was curt: as before, she didn’t seem to want to talk or even think much about her son. She dismissed the subject quickly. ‘Anyway, if you want to hear about different worlds colliding, you should really ask Jamie where he was last weekend.’
‘Really?’ he said, giving her a pleading look. ‘Does Rachel have to hear about that? We’ve only just met.’
‘But you have to tell her what happened. It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘It’s embarrassing.’
‘You shouldn’t be embarrassed. You come out of it very well. And if you’re lucky, she might put it in one of her stories. When I taught her at Oxford, she wrote quite a few short stories. Very good they were too.’
Rachel blushed with pleasure at the compliment. And she was full of curiosity by now, so Jamie realized that he was going to have to enlighten her, whether he liked it or not.
‘OK. So, last weekend,’ he began, still with palpable reluctance, ‘a friend of mine was getting married, and the night before we all went out on a stag night. To a lap-dancing club. Not my choice. I’d never been to one of these places before – never had to, never wanted to – so I wasn’t really prepared for the whole experience. So before I know what’s happening, this incredible woman, with a gorgeous figure, the kind of woman who’d never normally look at me, is sitting on my lap, more or less naked, with her arms around me, gyrating her hips, looking straight into my eyes. So I feel that something is … well, called for. Some sort of response. I feel that I have to say something.’
‘And what did you say?’ Rachel asked. ‘“You’re really beautiful”? “Thank you very much – here’s fifty pounds”?’
‘No,’ said Jamie. ‘I can see now that those would have been good things to say. But I asked her a question instead.’
He paused for a long time.
‘Go on.’
‘I asked her if she and the other girls … belonged to a union.’
Rachel stared at him, not convinced that she had heard correctly.
‘I mean, I was genuinely interested. I wanted to know what kind of employment rights they had, and whether they were unionized. It seemed like a good kind of conversational gambit.’
He looked down, apologetically, into the emptiness of his coffee cup. Laura waited to see Rachel’s reaction, and before long both women were laughing: helpless laughter, laughter without end. And then Jamie too. The readiness with which he joined them, was prepared to see the joke against himself, was adorable. Rachel decided there and then that she was not going to leave the Housman Club that morning without his mobile number.
7
At Euston station, Lucas turned to Rachel and held out his hand. For a moment she thought he had been about to kiss he
r on the cheek – they had just spent the whole day together, after all – but he went for a formal handshake instead. The delicate balance of the tutor–pupil relationship had to be preserved, she supposed.
‘Well, thank you, Rachel,’ he said. ‘That was a very … enlightening day.’
‘Enlightening?’
‘Yes. Well, I can’t really think of any other word, offhand.’
Rachel and Lucas had spent the day in Birmingham together, helping out at a food bank in Kings Norton. She’d had the idea earlier in the week, when she’d realized that Lucas would be with them for most of a ten-day half-term and had nothing much to do apart from his schoolwork. It might open his eyes, she thought, to come into direct contact with families dealing with food poverty, and it had been an easy enough thing to set up: choosing Birmingham more or less at random, as offering a sharpish contrast to the social and ethnic mix of Windsor, she had managed to arrange it all with a couple of emails.
‘What I mean is,’ he said, stammeringly, ‘– one reads about these places – one knows that they exist – but not everybody actually takes the plunge and visits them.’
‘Well, I expect all food banks are different,’ said Rachel, ‘but at least you now have a rough idea …’
‘Well … I was talking about Birmingham, actually. But yeah, food banks, too, I mean, it’s really cool to know what they’re all about, and so on.’
‘Good. Well, you mustn’t be late for your friends.’
‘No.’
‘Where are you meeting?’
‘Not far from here. Top of Centrepoint. I’ll probably grab a cab.’
‘Well, I bet they haven’t spent the whole day making up parcels of cornflakes and orange juice and hot chocolate. Don’t forget to show them the pictures. I bet they’ll be impressed.’
‘Yeah, they’ll have a right laugh, probably. I’ll do that.’
‘OK then.’
She waved goodbye and watched as his tall, loping frame was swallowed up by the crowds of commuters.
Rachel took the tube back to Turngreet Road but got out a few stops early, at Knightsbridge, wanting to walk through these quieter, emptier streets and think back on the events of the day. Try to come to terms with their strangeness. Lucas had fallen almost completely silent after their arrival at Birmingham New Street. Maybe this was down to self-preservation, because on the local train to Kings Norton, let alone at the food bank itself, his accent would immediately have attracted unwelcome attention. But Rachel was afraid there had been more to it than that. She thought again about his friends ‘having a laugh’ as they passed around the pictures of his visit, and knew that on some level he had found the whole episode not enlightening at all, but amusing. Everything from his bottle-green volunteer’s apron to the tins of fruit and vegetables stacked on the store room shelves had struck him, she now suspected, first as exotic, then somehow quaint and endearing, and finally comical. When they had been welcomed by Dawn, the centre’s cheerful manager, he’d found her Black Country accent so hard to understand that Rachel had had to translate for him. After that, to give him credit, he’d kept his head down and worked uncomplainingly, spending most of the day in the back room making up parcels without once letting slip that in his other, secret life he attended the most famous public school in the country. Now, though, having spent the day working hard, in a less than glamorous setting, without embarrassing himself or anyone around him, he had the advantage of being able to walk away from the experience without ever thinking about it again. On the train home he’d said almost nothing, just stared fixedly at his iPhone 6, lost in some group chat or solitary amusement. She hadn’t been expecting his worldview to be overturned in the space of a few hours: just hoping, perhaps, for some wondering comment, some register of shock at the discovery that, side by side with his own protected world, places like this should also need to exist. But if the thought occurred to him, he had chosen not to express it.
As for Rachel herself, she had been at the front counter, handing out the parcels themselves to downcast, monosyllabic women (they were mainly women) in return for vouchers. And that was when the strangest thing of all had happened.
‘Two-four-one!’ she had called out, and then, as she handed over the paper carrier, she realized that she knew the person who had come up to present her voucher. It was Val Doubleday, Alison’s mother.
‘Hello, Val!’ she had said. ‘It is Val, isn’t it?’ There was no sign of recognition on her part. ‘It’s me, Rachel. You know, Alison’s friend from Leeds?’
Val had looked confused: more than confused. The shock of finding someone from another city, and her distant past, in this place and in this role seemed to render her completely speechless. What should have been a joyful reunion dissolved into a scene of terrible awkwardness. Rachel had asked after Alison; had received some stilted, unconvincing reply to the effect that she was ‘doing fine’; had scribbled her email address on a piece of card and handed it over; and had explained that she was only visiting Birmingham for the day.
‘I heard you were on TV a few years ago,’ she added. ‘I’m sorry, I missed the whole thing. I’d just arrived at uni and, you know, you don’t really watch telly in the first year … Are you singing at the moment?’
Val did not answer this question. All she said, blurting out the words as quickly as she could was: ‘I’m not getting this stuff for myself. It’s my next-door neighbour – she’s old, and she can’t get out …’
‘Of course,’ Rachel said.
‘Say hi to your mother from me, won’t you?’ said Val. And then she was gone, not looking back. In fact she had not made eye contact at all during the whole encounter.
Rachel stared after her, trying to work out what had just happened. She didn’t snap out of it until Dawn came out from the store room with the latest parcel, having finally, it seemed, found a temporary chink in Lucas’s wall of silence and self-concealment.
‘I love your friend,’ she said. ‘He’s hilarious. Do you know what he called this?’ She held up a jar of decaf coffee from the top of the parcel, and said, in a deadly impression of his sardonic drawl: ‘Bit of a Mickey Mouse drink, if you ask me.’
8
If Lucas was proving difficult to change, the twin daughters, Grace and Sophia, presented an equal challenge. Rachel did not know what to make of them at all. They were very intelligent, she could see that. Very determined, too. They were picking up their new languages quickly; so quickly, that Rachel herself could barely keep up with them. Their prep school had small class sizes, and there were regular, weekly tests in most subjects. The twins took careful notice of the results and would waste no time in telling her whether they had come first, second or third in the rankings. (They were rarely any lower than that.) They played elaborate games on their PlayStations and watched American comedy shows on their iPads, often following the dialogue with concentration rather than enjoyment. Rachel would read to them every night at the end of their lessons but she found it difficult to choose stories that would engage them, and would often be surprised by their responses. Once she tried reading them one of her favourite stories, H. G. Wells’s ‘The Door in the Wall’. How could they fail to be moved, she thought, by this tale of a young boy who, at the age of five, finds a door in the wall of an ordinary London street, and discovers that it leads to a magical garden: a door he will never be able to locate again, a garden he will never revisit, despite a lifetime of efforts and longings? She liked to ask questions as she went along, to make sure that they understood what they were hearing: and when the little boy was first expelled from the garden, was sent
back into the ‘grey world’ of London again, and admitted, years later, that ‘as I realized the fullness of what had happened to me, I gave way to quite ungovernable grief’, she said to them: ‘So – why do you think he’s crying?’
Sophia’s answer was hard to forget. ‘Because he’s weak,’ she said, calmly.
Were Sir Gilbert and Madiana satisfied with the progress she was making with their children? It was hard to tell. For one thing, she could never be entirely sure when they were even at home: if, indeed, their London residence was their ‘home’ in any meaningful sense. On her side of the house, there were CCTV cameras everywhere: not in her bedroom, thankfully, and not in the bathroom as far as she could tell, but certainly in the kitchen, and all the stairways and landings. The images from these cameras could be streamed to Sir Gilbert’s or Madiana’s smartphones and tablets wherever they were in the world, so they always knew when Rachel was in the house and when she had gone out. But the arrangement was not reciprocal. Her employers kept her informed about their own movements on a need-to-know basis, which meant, in practice, that Rachel had no way of knowing where they were at all. When they were at home, they made very little noise, and the presence of lights in the windows meant nothing, since for security reasons the lights were programmed to come on automatically at random, whether the house was occupied or not.