Jonathan Coe - Number 11

Well, Rachel, you were looking well I must say — Oxford must have agreed with you — but I still don’t really understand what you were doing working in that place. Maybe I’ll find out if this means that we’re going to be back in touch again from now on. It would be nice to see your mum again. I often think of that crazy trip we took to Corfu together — ten years ago, was it? Happy times.

Love from

Val

*

Alison Doubleday is the archetypal paragon of modern entitlement. The kind of person the British left-liberal establishment cannot do enough to help.

After experiencing problems with her left leg as a teenager, she had a new, state-of-the-art one fitted by dedicated NHS staff at a hospital in Birmingham — despite only having lived there for a few weeks.

The minute she became eligible for Disability Living Allowance she signed on, and has been receiving it ever since. That’s in addition to the Housing Benefit she receives for the bijou three-bedroom house she shares with her lesbian lover Selena in Birmingham’s fashionable Acocks Green.

Neither of them goes out to work. Both of them claim Jobseeker’s Allowance. And yet Alison already has a job — an extremely lucrative one.

As a self-styled ‘artist’ she has created a studio in one of her bedrooms at home. Here she creates her so-called ‘political’ portraits of homeless people.

She makes them sit for hours in poses reminiscent of the great paintings of European monarchs by the likes of Titian and Van Dyck.

‘In my pictures, I try to give these dispossessed people the dignity and grandeur of the Kings and Queens of old,’ she says.

Needless to say, while other talented artists — whose work does not press the same political buttons — languish in obscurity, Alison’s heavily ideological portraits are much sought after by London’s chaterati.

At a private show of her work in Hoxton’s fashionable Recktall Brown Gallery last month, her pictures went on sale with a price tag of up to £20,000. Many were snapped up by the adoring crowd of champagne socialists and North London luvvies.

And what percentage of the profits did our crusading artist declare to the authorities, so that it could be ploughed back into REAL assistance for Britain’s sick and homeless?

That’s right — a big, fat zero!

Alison — the daughter of failed singer and washed-up ‘reality’ TV star Val Doubleday — was not surprisingly unavailable for comment today when we tried to contact her.

Faustina and Jules were from Majuro, the most populous of the Marshall Islands, a small group of coral atolls lying just north of the Equator in the Pacific Ocean. They had been working for the Gunns for a little under two years.

They were reserved, friendly and uncomplaining. If the lifestyle of Sir Gilbert, Madiana and their family seemed unusual to them, they did not comment upon it. The care they lavished on their respective charges was exemplary: Faustina made sure that the twins were clean and well presented at all times, and replenished at regular intervals; meanwhile, Jules performed exactly the same function for the cars. They rarely went out to sample the diversions that London might have offered them; all their energies were bent upon saving as much money as possible out of their earnings. In the evenings they would sit in the kitchen watching television, trying to decode the niceties of British culture from the hints that the programmes let fall. Like Rachel, like the rest of the country — like the rest of the world, it sometimes appeared — they were fascinated in particular by Downton Abbey , ITV’s big-budget soap opera following the changing fortunes of the Crawley family in post-Edwardian England. Faustina and Jules never missed an episode, and once a week would surrender themselves to the show’s high production values and its quiet, insistent, endlessly reassuring message. At the heart of this message, it seemed, was the absolute necessity of the existence of both a master and a servant class. It was understood that the master class, in particular, would always conduct itself with decency and generosity; and that although the hierarchy dividing one class from another was absolute, fellow-feeling and respectful, amicable contact between the two were not unknown. Every Sunday evening, Faustina and Jules would retire to bed having been reminded that this was the natural and indeed inevitable order of things, as much in the London of 2015 as in the troubled years between the two world wars. Whether they ever remarked upon the absence of such fellow-feeling and amicable contact in their own relationship with Sir Gilbert and Madiana, Rachel could not say.

At night, when the television was turned off, the house fell silent. In fact Rachel soon came to realize that this part of London was defined by its extremes of silence and noise. During the daytime the noise pollution from building works was overwhelming, whereas at night a profound and eerie stillness settled upon the whole area. Most of these houses had been bought as investments: there was rarely anyone living in them, and after dark, the quietness and emptiness of the streets was unsettling. One of the things that had most impressed Rachel about the rich, since she had started to know them, was their ability to disappear. She mentioned this to Jamie once, when discussing his thesis on ‘invisible people’ in the new age of austerity. ‘But you shouldn’t just be writing about poor people,’ she told him. ‘The rich can make themselves invisible too.’

Rachel and Jamie saw each other two or three times a week: the days varied, but Sunday was a constant. On Sundays they would meet for a late breakfast or early lunch, and then take in a gallery or museum or film screening at a Curzon cinema or the BFI. Rachel felt strongly attracted to Jamie, but he was very absorbed in his work, and for her own part, she still did not feel quite ready for a full-blown relationship: her experiences in the last few months had made her realize how much she still had to learn, not just about the world but about herself. And so, for the time being, they were taking things slowly.

It was late one Sunday morning in January, when she was getting ready to meet him at a pub in Little Venice, that Rachel’s mobile rang and she saw Madiana’s name on the incoming call screen.

‘Rachel?’ said that flat, imperious voice. ‘The girls need you. You have to come at once.’

‘Erm, sure …’ said Rachel, her heart sinking. ‘What’s it about?’

‘You didn’t tell me that the girls have a maths exam tomorrow morning.’

‘Well, it’s only a little test, really, not an exam.’

‘But they don’t understand these equations at all . You’re going to have to come and explain them.’

‘OK.’ Doubtless this would mean a trip up the M40 to ‘the cottage’. ‘Where are you, where do you want me to come?’

It seemed that Madiana, Gilbert and the twins were not at the cottage this weekend, however. They were in Lausanne.

She was there in less than three hours. Jules drove her to the helipad in Battersea: she texted Jamie on the way to say that she wouldn’t be able to see him that day after all. From there, a helicopter took her to a private airfield just outside Oxford, where a LearJet was waiting to carry her to Switzerland.

It was her first time in Sir Gilbert’s private plane (or anybody’s, for that matter). The flight was, as she might have expected, intensely pleasurable. She helped herself to a chicken caesar salad from the galley kitchen and washed it down with a cold bottle of Peroni. She stretched out in one of the wide, yielding, smoothly upholstered club seats and passed the time flicking through pristine copies of Vogue and Tatler . She remembered what Frederick Francis had said when they rode towards Soho in the Mercedes together: ‘Everyone should experience a ride in a car like this at least once. Then they’d have something to aspire to.’ She could see his point. One of these days — perhaps sooner rather than later — she was going to part company with the Gunns, and after that she would never know luxury like this again. Coming down to earth would be difficult.