Paradise City (12 page)

They walk across a thin strip of corridor to the private dining room where a table has already been laid for dinner. The plan was to have the starter before the opera began at 7.30 p.m., then to eat a subsequent course at each interval. The one good thing about opera being so bloody long, thinks Howard, is that at least you got a chance to eat and drink properly.

The waiters bring out the starter on oblong plates bearing miniature Scotch eggs and three artfully arranged asparagus spears. When Howard cuts into the egg, yolk trickles out onto the white china. He grunts, satisfied.

‘So, Howard.’ Bradley leans into him, as though about to reveal some juicy personal secret. ‘How’s tricks?’

‘Good, thanks, yeah. Bit of trouble earlier this year with the shareholders and the remuneration packages, that kind of thing, but it’s mostly blown over. To be expected.’

Bradley arches his eyebrow.

‘Word is the UK government wants to tax the shit out of successful capitalists.’

‘Well when I spoke to David the other day—’ Howard says, casually dropping the first name of the Prime Minister into the conversation and watching the studied casualness with which Bradley disguises the fact he is impressed. ‘He assured me that his party was very much in favour of wealth creation. He’s well aware that without people like me contributing over the odds through our taxes there’d be no way of even beginning to tackle the deficit. None at all.’

In fact, his intimate tête-à-tête with the Prime Minister had taken place over six months previously and had consisted of a few polite words exchanged over canapés at a reception in Number 10, but he wasn’t about to let on. It did no harm to remind those who needed reminding of his status.

‘Wow,’ Bradley replies, covering the mouth of his wine glass as the waiter proffers a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet. ‘I’m impressed you have the Prime Minister’s ear.’

Howard lets the thought lie, silent, between them. He is already bored and glances across the table to get Claudia’s attention. She is throwing her head back, laughing, and the soft, freckled indentation of her neck glints in the light. Looking at the softness of her throat, he thinks how easy it would be to slit it.

He motions to the waiter to refill his glass and drinks more swiftly than he should. In a few minutes, the lights start to dim and the assembled crowd is ushered through to the Royal Box for the performance. There is a heady waft of Coco Mademoiselle and he realises Claudia is by his side. She taps his elbow and strains upwards to whisper in his ear.

‘Remember to turn your phone off, Howie. I know what you’re like.’

‘Already done it,’ he fibs, then surreptitiously fumbles inside his jacket pocket and switches his BlackBerry to ‘silent’.

He takes his seat in the front row of the box, edging forwards over the balcony to look at the crowds, squinting to see if he recognises anyone. Claudia places herself bolt upright on her seat, fixing her face with a vague smile. He catches her out of the corner of his eye as the curtain goes up and he wonders, not for the first time, what on earth she might be thinking.

The first act passes. There are the inevitable soprano trills and rumbling bass notes, all stitched together pleasantly enough by the swellings of the orchestra. An inventive set designer had transposed the action from a garret in nineteenth-century Paris to a 1950s loft apartment in Manhattan, complete with low-slung Danish side cabinets and Martini glasses. The female singers were trussed up tightly in the kind of dresses his mother used to wear: nipped in at the waist, full-skirted, an elegant neckline.

They were all so fat though, weren’t they? Why are opera singers so large, he finds himself wondering? Was it something to do with having to accommodate the extra lung capacity? Or was it a convention that had set in, so that the profession of opera singer attracted people with good voices who also happened to like their food? Whereas pop music tended to suck up all the chisel-jawed men and neurotic anorexics.

Anorexia. Terrible disease. He’d previously always been minded to dismiss it as a psychosomatic self-indulgence. But that was before Ada.

He finds his thoughts hovering, dangerously, over an image of Ada, her hip bones jutting out, her ribcage pressing through skin as translucent as airmail paper. She had been sixteen and studying for her GCSEs when the teachers at her boarding school had noticed she wasn’t eating. They’d called Howard and Penny in ‘for a chat’ and had asked them both whether there were any tensions at home they should know about – as if it were any of their bloody business.

The headmistress – a colourless woman called Miss Dunn, dressed in a tweedy two-piece, her hair set in dull grey curls – had sat them in her office and talked at them for the best part of twenty minutes.

‘We find that a lot of girls tend towards eating disorders when they’re seeking to re-establish control over some area of their life,’ she had said. The expression on her face tried to be sympathetic but stopped just short of being successful. ‘Sometimes this can be because they’re falling behind in their studies. Or a friendship group has splintered. Or’ – she lowered her voice with meticulous understanding – ‘it can be because her parents are going through some difficulties. Separation, for instance. The prospect of divorce. Adolescent girls are terribly sensitive. They pick up on the smallest things.’

Howard had been dumbstruck by the cheek of the woman. He hadn’t trusted himself to speak. It was Penny who had stepped in to salvage the situation.

‘No, Miss Dunn, there’s nothing like that going on,’ she said in a small, calm voice. ‘Howard and I are very happily married and we love Ada dearly.’

Looking at his wife then, with her upturned nose, her pink cheeks and tiny hands – all of her so neat and precise like a matchbox doll – he had felt a wash of love for her so acute that it stopped the breath in his throat.

‘I should think, if Ada is unhappy,’ Penny continued, ‘it’s because she doesn’t like this school.’

The headmistress fidgeted with a string of pearls at her neck. Penny stared directly at her, her hands clasped on her lap, holding tightly on to the strap of her leather handbag. ‘And having spent half an hour in your company, Miss Dunn, I can’t say I blame her.’ She said it just like that, in the same small voice, as though she’d been pointing out a loose thread on the teacher’s cardigan.

Then Penny stood up, swept down her skirt and held out her hand until Howard took it in his. They left the room together without another word.

They’d taken Ada out the same day and found her a place in a local private school. He remembers looking at her in the back of the car as Jocelyn drove them back to London. Her dark eyes had acquired a wariness that wasn’t there before. She jumped at noises like an animal twitching at the crackling of twigs. Her face was sallow and the hair on her arms had grown thicker. The maroon school uniform hung loosely on her bones. Her socks gathered around her ankles like discarded snakeskins and he could see a blue twist of vein pulsing at her wrist.

He couldn’t bear to touch her. She seemed shrunken, her sense of self lessened by the physical loss of flesh. But at the same time, she was frighteningly alive. There was something about her, some vital energy that pressed to the surface of her skeletal appearance, as though her rejection of the primal need to eat had left her stripped back, blessed with a total purity of thought, an ability to see through everything for what it was. The way she looked at him . . . it was like he had no secrets left. He was reminded of those stories of religious fanatics who fasted for days on end, believing it was only through divesting the body of its bestial urges that one could attain spiritual enlightenment.

Physically, she was at her most vulnerable and childlike. But her eyes . . . her eyes were so old. They were his mother’s eyes.

When they got her home, Penny had lifted her onto the scales and she weighed a fraction over six stone. Standing at the bathroom door, still unable to talk, Howard flinched. It had required such self-control to get to that state and he was horrified, but one of the most disturbing aspects of it all was that there was a sliver of recognition within him. He couldn’t help but admire the mental strength it displayed. The tenacity of it.

Howard tries to concentrate on the opera and focuses on the English subtitles, scrolling across the miniature screen in front of him. A warbling woman on stage is singing about a restaurant bill.

He leans across to Claudia and whispers in her ear.

‘Not much of a story, is it?’

He can feel her roll her eyes even though it is too dark to see the detail of her face.

‘That’s not the point, Howie. It’s the music. The music’s so beautiful.’

He sighs, more loudly than he’d intended, and tries to make out the time on his watch. For the rest of the act, he thinks about the latest balance sheets. The Paradiso Group was doing well, in spite of the economic crisis. He’s noticed that women keep buying clothes, even when money is tight. They want to look their best, even if everything is unravelling behind closed doors. It’s a lesson he learned on Petticoat Lane: when Mrs Foster’s husband was sent down for armed robbery and she had barely a penny left to scrape together, she would come to the stall every Friday and buy herself something – anything, really, it didn’t matter how small. One week, it was a scarf. The next, a hairpin. The routine of it was important to her. The face-saving.

And he’s made sure that Fash Attack, his flagship chain of stores, has a good price point: cheap enough for students to shop there but not so cheap that they were being accused of promoting sweat-shop labour and disposable fashion by the granola-munching, sandal-wearing brigade.

Christ, what a bunch of tossers. They’d march in the street, lob bricks through his windows, accuse him of being a greedy capitalist bastard without ever having the subtlety of mind to realise he was creating jobs and paying a ridiculous amount of tax just so they could go on claiming benefits and sending their children to state-subsidised schools and hospitals. He’s sick of the lot of them.

Oxfam approached him last year with a proposal for an ‘ethical’ jewellery range. Flattened Coke-bottle tops, strung together with beads and brass chains by African villagers – that kind of thing. They’d got some model to lend her name to the whole ghastly enterprise. She’d come into his office wearing a floaty white kaftan and had spoken to him about the need ‘to give something back’.

‘I give plenty back already, sweetheart,’ he’d said.

She gazed at him with vacantly pretty eyes. ‘But if you could see these women, if you could see what it means to them to be making these pieces—’ That’s what she called the sorry-looking bracelets and necklaces – ‘pieces’, like they were art or something.

‘Listen, love. I know you’re trying your best. I know your publicist has probably told you this is a great thing to be doing, given you’re knocking on a bit and all the M & S campaigns have gone to Myleene Klass and Twiggy . . .’

She smiled.

‘But I’m afraid I’m not interested. I already give money to charity. My conscience is clear.’

She was so surprised by his bluntness that she kept smiling at him as he was speaking. At the end of their meeting, she’d even leaned across and given him a peck on the cheek. She smelled gorgeous: sea-salt mixed in with a musky hint of incense. The model had wafted back out onto the street, trailed by half a dozen hipsterish types in trendy spectacles and rolled-up chinos. He’d never heard from her again.

All around him, there is applause. Bradley is clapping noisily and shaking his head, seemingly incredulous at the brilliant operatic performance he’s just witnessed. That’s the thing with Americans, Howard thinks. They always try a bit too hard. It’s the newness of their country. They’re overcompensating.

The group rises as one and goes back through to the dining room where the waiters are already standing with the main course. Howard glances at the plates, covered with edible purple flowers and thinly shaved slices of beetroot. His stomach turns. What he wouldn’t give for a bowl of chicken soup.

He fishes out his phone from his jacket pocket and glances at the screen, not expecting anyone to have called him. There are five missed calls, all from the same number. Rupert. He checks his email. There is one from Rupert, flagged up by a vivid red exclamation mark and the word ‘Urgent’.

‘Howard – call me asap,’ it reads.

Claudia is standing next to him, her hand on his arm. He thinks she has a quizzical expression on her face although her skin is as immobile as a factory-farmed chicken breast, all swollen with water and hormones.

‘I just have to make a call.’

He walks out into the corridor before she has a chance to protest. He feels a thudding panic rising up in his gullet. When he scrolls through to get to Rupert’s numbers, the pads of his fingers are coated with a light sheen of sweat. Why is he so tense?

He knows of course. It is always for the same reason: fear of being found out. Fear that someone is going to tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘You don’t really belong here, do you?’ and send him back to Stepney.

The phone rings, once, twice. Before it rings a third time, Rupert picks up.

‘Howard,’ he says. ‘We’ve got a problem.’

‘What is it?’

‘Does the name Beatrice Kizza mean anything to you?’

‘No.’

‘She works as a chambermaid in the Mayfair Rotunda.’