‘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.