Jonathan Coe - Number 11

He put his pencil down.

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know … I mean …’

‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘Are we going to do it or not?’

He pulled off his shirt and slid in beside her. Rachel put her arms around him and planted a long, moist kiss on his mouth.

‘I was attacked last week,’ she murmured, as Jamie’s hands began to glide over her body. Immediately he stopped and pulled back.

‘What?’

‘This guy came round to the house and … tried it on with me.’

‘Guy? What guy? Who was it?’

‘Someone I know. A friend of Gilbert’s.’

‘Did you report it to the police? Did he hurt you?’

‘He probably would have done. But he didn’t get very far.’

Jamie pulled away even further, sitting upright and staring down at her angrily.

‘Tell me his name.’

‘No. Why?’

‘Tell me the bastard’s name.’

‘Then what are you going to do?’

‘I’ll go and smash his face in.’

Rachel tried hard, but couldn’t refrain from giggling.

‘Come off it. You?’

‘Yes, me.’

She reached up, put her arms around Jamie’s shoulders, and pulled him back towards her.

‘That’s very touching, sweetheart, but it’s the last thing I want.’

She kissed him again.

‘What do you want instead?’ he asked.

‘A bit of tender loving care would be nice,’ said Rachel, taking his hand and placing it carefully between her legs.

They made love twice: the first time being slow, and gentle, and deeply satisfying, the second being much more fierce and urgent. Then, just as Rachel was about to reach her second climax, Jamie’s mobile phone rang. To her amazement, he leaned over to answer it.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it might be important.’

‘Fuck that,’ she said, biting him frantically on the neck. ‘This is important.’

But still, Jamie craned over and glanced even more closely at the name on the screen.

‘I’ll have to get this,’ he said. ‘It’s Laura.’

He picked up the phone and answered the call. Furious, Rachel flopped back on to the bed, panting heavily, more with frustration than anything else. She had been on the very brink of orgasm. She couldn’t believe that he’d abandoned her at that precise moment.

She ran her hands through her hair and then down the side of her neck, feeling the sweat that had gathered there. For a while she was too agitated to take any notice of what he was saying. Then she became aware that Jamie and Laura were making some kind of arrangement to meet tomorrow evening: there was mention of a train journey. Then Jamie was asking her about someone who should, it seemed, have been joining them, but had gone missing. ‘Well, when did anyone last see him …?’ he was saying. Rachel could hear Laura’s voice at the other end of the line and could tell that the conversation was going to continue for some time. That was as much as she could tolerate. She got out of bed, clutching the duvet to hide her nudity, and pulled on her clothes as quickly as possible. By the time Jamie had finished his call, she was fully dressed and standing at the bedroom door.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked, looking genuinely surprised.

‘Back to work,’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Me? I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Tomorrow, I mean.’

‘Oh, that … Laura’s asked me to go up to Scotland with her. Didn’t I mention that?’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘It’s this committee she’s on. They’re going on a jolly to Inverness.’

‘ Inverness? ’

‘The Scottish Tourist Board have asked them to come up and put a price on the Loch Ness Monster.’

‘How completely ridiculous. And you’re going because …?’

‘She thinks it’ll be good experience for me. You don’t mind, do you?’

Rachel said nothing. Jamie frowned.

‘A strange thing, though,’ he said. ‘Lord Lucrum, the head of the committee … Nobody can find him. He seems to have gone missing.’

At any other time, Rachel might have found this interesting. At the moment, though, she was far too discomposed, both physically and emotionally, to give the subject even cursory thought.

‘’Bye, then,’ she said. ‘And thanks for showing me the film. It was great.’

And before leaving, she gave Jamie another kiss on the mouth: one which already foretold, in its briefness and politeness, the death throes of a relationship which had scarcely begun.

The silence had returned. As soon as the girls went to bed, as soon as their television was turned off and their friendly chatter came to an end, that was when the silence entered the house, climbing the stairs and wreathing its way into every room like a trail of mist.

Rachel tried to ignore the silence. Tried to pretend it wasn’t there. She turned on her computer and streamed some music. She Googled the Morecambe Bay cocklepickers and, after reading some old news stories about them, added a final few paragraphs to her memoir. Still she felt horribly apprehensive and uneasy. Every muscle in her body was taut with anxiety.

While she was online, she did some more browsing and read some of today’s newspaper stories:

HELP FIND OUR JOSEPHINE , one headline said.

Thinking that there was a distant, subtle noise outside, out in the garden, Rachel turned off the music and opened the bedroom window. The restless, eternal hum of London was all that she heard. She looked out into the night. She looked down at the pit. There was nothing. No sound. No movement.

The recent death of a seven-year-old girl on the Marshall Islands could have been averted, an expert has claimed.

Chris Baxter, operations director of SafeSpace Ordnance Removal, a small NGO which has been working to raise awareness of the dangers of unexploded WW2 ordnance on the tiny group of islands, said that the area where the girl was playing should have been cleared by now.

‘Our programme of clearing this area was 70 % complete,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately our operation was closed down when one of our competitors, Winshaw Clearance, was chosen to complete the contract. As of today, my understanding is that Winshaw have yet to commence any operations in the area.’

The CEO of Winshaw Clearance, Helke Winshaw, was unavailable for comment.

A flapping noise reached her from the garden. It looked like the corner of the tarpaulin had come loose again. How had that happened?

A rustling noise, a scuttling. Like legs on loose gravel.

All in her mind. All imagination.

Fears are growing for the safety of Lord Lucrum, chairman of the Institute for Quality Valuation, who has not been seen for ten days.

The flapping of the tarpaulin was more insistent now. Rachel decided that she would have to go outside and check on it. She tiptoed quickly down the first flight of stairs, not knowing why it felt so important to be quiet. The mirrored door was wedged open, as it had been for the last few days. She slipped through it and peeped around Sophia’s half-open bedroom door. The twins had both chosen to sleep in the same bed, for some reason, their arms wrapped around each other. She could hear their gentle breathing.

Down two more flights of stairs, and into the staff kitchen. She turned on all the lights. Then, very carefully, she unbolted and opened the kitchen door. The cold night air rushed in at once, confronting her, encircling her. She stood on the threshold, not crossing it yet, listening for the tiniest of sounds, her head cocked, as tense as a hunting dog sniffing for a hint of its prey.

She stayed like that for twenty seconds or more, until there was a sudden, unexpected noise which in the stillness of the night seemed deafeningly loud and almost made her jump in the air. It was the buzzer at the front door.