Paradise City (2 page)

One of the headlines had read: ‘Howard Pink: the self-made tycoon who’s got it tailor-made.’ The accompanying photograph showed him mid-laughter, his stomach billowing out like a sail in full wind, his face scrunched up, his tongue lolling grotesquely to one side. He’d liked the idea of being a tycoon.

The picture did him no favours. Still, he thought he could live with it.

But through the years, that photo had been used again and again. Even though it was now twenty years out of date and he’d stopped giving interviews after what happened, they still used it like a taunt, a reminder of his perceived clownishness. For a while, for obvious reasons, he’d become ‘Tragic self-made millionaire Howard Pink’ and the photograph had disappeared, but now there had been a sudden resurgence.

It had popped up again last month in an in-flight magazine. He’d been flying back first-class from Munich and there it was, in full Technicolor glory, when he leafed through
Airwaves
: a gurning facsimile of Howard Pinkishness, used to illustrate a four-page feature on British businesses. He’d been fatter back then and had indulged in a misguided attempt to grow some facial hair. It was before he’d had his teeth done too. Suffice to say, it wasn’t his best angle.

After the in-flight magazine, he’d called Rupert, his PR man.

‘Anything you can do to stop them using that fucking thing?’ he’d asked.

‘Legally, you mean?’

‘Legally, illegally, I’m not fussy.’

There had been a quick intake of breath on the other end of the line. Rupert could never tell whether his boss was joking or not.

‘Er, well, Howard, we want to keep the media on-side, for obvious reasons, so I’d caution against doing anything too draconian—’

‘Draconian’. Another of Claudia’s words.

‘But why don’t I do a quick call-round of the newspaper editors and ask them to refrain from using it? They’ll be only too willing to play ball if it means they get more access.’

‘I don’t want to give more access, Rupe.’

Rupert tittered ‘Yes, but they don’t need to know that, do they? Leave it with me, Howard.’

Rupert had done his ring-round and, for a few weeks, the photograph had retreated from view like an unsightly child. But then, yesterday, there it was again: slap bang in the middle of a page in the
Sunday Tribune
, accompanying an article based on the wafer-thin scientific premise that life is kinder to optimists. The caption read: ‘Despite personal unhappiness, the self-made millionaire Sir Howard Pink has always looked on the brighter side.’

He’s sick of everyone assuming they know him. He’s sick of the caricature. He fears he’ll never be taken seriously. The BBC had never asked him back, had they? Instead, any time they needed a talking head, they got that preening old buffer with the luxuriant white hair who ran the Association of British Retail and who wouldn’t know what good sense was if it painted itself purple and jumped on his nose. Wanker.

‘They can’t disassociate you now from what happened with Ada,’ Rupert had told him once, choosing his words carefully. ‘They see the tragic backstory, not the business acumen.’

‘The tragic backstory’. Those had been his exact words.

Howard feels anger rising in his gut. He goes to the window, draws back the curtain and peers out at London’s grubby weekday glamour, looking for something to soothe his nascent agitation. A black trickle of taxicabs is beetling its way to the hotel entrance like a spreading trail of petrol. From his vantage point, Howard can make out the shiny hardness of their bonnets, the lucent yellow of each ‘For Hire’ sign reflected in the dark pool of the paintwork. Shifting his gaze along the road, he sees a young woman in high heels and a flapping mackintosh, belt knotted at the back, a copy of the
Evening Standard
peeking out of her handbag. She is holding a lit cigarette between two fingers and a café-chain cardboard cup of coffee in the other hand and she is walking so quickly that the coffee keeps spilling over the aperture in the plastic lid and splashing onto the checked lining of her coat. He wonders if she’ll notice soon, or if it will only be later, when she takes off her coat and is assailed by the musty smell of stale, too-sweet coffee, that she will realise. He wishes he could follow her to find out. He likes to know how a story ends.

The woman carries on walking: a brisk tick-tacking on the paving stones that echoes then fades. Up above her, a metal criss-cross of scaffolding has been erected to cover the façade of the mansion block opposite, each slotted-in pole the precise pigeon-grey of the sky beyond, each brick the damp russet colour that Howard has come to associate uniquely with his city. A builder in a hard hat and a reflective vest sends a formless shout into the street below.

Howard wishes they’d stop tampering with everything. There was so much building going on in London these days. Lumbering mechanical cranes pierced the skyline at regular intervals. Hoardings patterned with the meaningless insignia of redevelopment had cropped up everywhere. Streets were shut down, traffic diverted, bridges closed, all in the name of a frantic progress, an endless quest for more things that were shiny and new and glittering, when increasingly all Howard lusts after is the past, packaged up, preserved and honoured. Nice, historical buildings that didn’t demand attention, designed to a manageable scale so that everyone knew what they were getting.

He lets the curtain fall and then reminds himself he is not here to get annoyed by modern architecture. These monthly nights in this Mayfair hotel are meant to be his meditation space, a few hours’ holiday from himself and his memories. Only Rupert, Claudia and Tracy, his PA, know about them. Everyone else is told he’s away on business. He tells himself he must make the most of it before going back to normality tomorrow morning.

He takes slower breaths. He pushes back his shoulder blades and stretches his arms. He tries counting to ten but only gets to three before he remembers the Chablis.

Howard takes the bottle out of the minibar, unscrews the top and pours himself a healthy measure. The glass frosts up satisfyingly. Perfect temperature. A viticulturist (there are such things) once told him he shouldn’t over-refrigerate white wines. Howard repeated this to anyone he thought might be impressed and sometimes sent back cold wine at restaurants just to show he couldn’t be made a fool of. In the privacy of these four walls, however, he felt at liberty to indulge his own secret taste.

Or lack of it, as the case may be.

There is a knock on the door.

‘Housekeeping,’ comes a disembodied voice from the other side of the lustrous wood laminate.

Howard looks at the bedside clock. He is shocked to see it is already 6 p.m. and the maid is coming to do the pre-dinner turn-down. He opens the door. A black face smiles at him broadly.

‘I can come back later if you like,’ the woman says, her voice lightly accented. Howard takes in the smoothness of her skin, taught over high cheekbones, and the compactness of her diminutive frame, clad in a fitted black blouse and black trousers. She is carrying a moulded plastic basket, filled with cleaning products and mini-packets of shortbread.

‘No, no,’ he replies, loosening the belt of his robe ever so slightly. ‘Come on in.’ He holds the door with his arm so that the maid has to bend under to walk through. She giggles as she does so. Howard is encouraged.

The maid checks the tea tray and replaces a sachet of hot chocolate, then goes into the bedroom with a quick economy of movement. When Howard follows, he sees she is piling the purple and brown cushions neatly at the foot of the bed. She glances over her shoulder, catches his eye and giggles again. He laughs lightly, then takes two steps towards her. She is bending over the bed and her backside is pressing against the fabric of her trousers. Howard, who knows how these things are done, who has successfully initiated a handful of similar transactions in high-end hotels across the globe, comes up close behind her, puts his hands on either side of her waist and nudges the knot of his robe belt against the maid’s haunches.

For a second, she tenses and does not move. Then, without looking at him, the maid straightens up, letting the pillow she is holding in one hand drop onto the Egyptian cotton, 450-thread count sheets.

‘Sir . . . I  . . .’

‘Shhh,’ Howard says, nuzzling her neck, smelling the sweetness of cocoa butter. He does not like to talk in these situations. Talking would make it more real.

With the maid still turned towards the bed, he unbuttons her shirt with the quick fingers bequeathed him by generations of Finks. He slips his thumb underneath the wiring of her bra, easing in his hand until it cups the maid’s right breast. He groans, in spite of himself. With his free hand, he undoes his belt, lets the robe fall open, and grips his erection. He starts slowly, rhythmically, moving up and down the shaft, all the while holding the maid’s breast, feeling the nipple turn hard underneath his touch. She is breathing more quickly now. He cannot see her face but he knows, without needing to have it confirmed, that she is smiling, that she is enjoying this, that she is loving the attention, that she is gagging for it, that she needs him to thrust against her and take her and spill his white seed across her skin . . . He comes with a half-suppressed sigh and a feeling of disgust. It is all over in a matter of seconds.

He is aware, even in the midst of his supposed abandon, of the need not to stain the maid’s dark trousers.

Once a tailor, always a tailor, as his mum might say. God rest her soul.

ESME

Esme has started walking to the office as part of a springtime health kick. She lives in Shepherd’s Bush and works on High Street Kensington, so admittedly, it’s not the most arduous walk and, according to those miserable cut-out-and-keep fitness guides in various women’s magazines, it will hardly burn any calories at all (something called spinning does that, she has discovered, and she imagines a stuffy room filled with Victorian peasants frantically producing exercise leotards from their super-fast spinning wheels). Anyway, apparently spinning gets rid of 450 calories an hour. A Mars bar contains 280. So the chances are that her forty-five-minute walk will allow her to eat approximately half a molecule more chocolate than she would do otherwise.

But the walk makes her feel better, mentally. It makes her feel she’s doing something, at least, instead of sitting on her arse all day, either at her desk or in the train on the way to another futile doorstep on editor’s orders. Esme doesn’t need to lose weight. She possesses the natural slenderness of the terminally neurotic. But, being a woman, she feels guilty about not exercising. And her colleague Sanjay once told her that your metabolism slowed down to a crawling pace when you hit thirty. She’d been eating a baked potato at the time.

‘You won’t be able to do carbs any more,’ he’d said, flicking an elegant wrist in her direction. ‘You’ll want to be eating seeds and grains.’

‘Seeds and grains?’ She pushed the baked potato to one side, regretfully. ‘What, like birds?’

Sanjay nodded knowledgeably. He was the health editor and abreast of such things.

‘Keen-wah,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’ll need.’

‘Bless you.’

‘Ha-de-bloody-ha. I’m only telling you this for your own good, missy. This’ – he flapped a hand in front of her torso – ‘doesn’t come for free.’

When she’d turned thirty last December, Sanjay’s words had jangled in her head like a drawerful of mismatched cutlery. She was terrified that she’d pile on unwanted pounds purely by eating the same as she’d always done. For about a week, Esme had stuck faithfully to the recipes provided by a ‘Low-GI’ website but, by the end of seven days, she was heartily sick of egg-white omelettes and slow-release oats. Then it was Christmas anyhow so there was no point in thinking about calorie control, and after a few months she realised nothing had changed. She still hovered around nine stone and ideally wanted to be eight, like Liz Hurley, but there were some things you just had to live with.

If only she were more like Robbie. Her brother had an innate capacity for getting on with life. He never worried too much about anything and, as a result, he seemed to love exercise purely for the uncomplicated physical motion, as if the pump and pound of each straining muscle could push out extraneous thought. He’d done the London Marathon last year in under five hours without even trying. She’d been there to cheer him on past the finish line and he’d given her a huge, sweaty hug from underneath a crinkly silver blanket that was meant to help his muscles relax.

She hates running. The walking though . . . the walking was a good thing. Esme liked the routine of it. She liked putting on her trainers (last worn when she tried out – unsuccessfully – for the university hockey team) and packing her smart shoes in a bag to change into later because it prolonged the morning, delaying the inevitability of work just that little bit longer.

The trainers make her feel she is bouncing along the pavement. Today, the bounce is accentuated by her good mood. She’d had a page lead-in on Sunday about the power of optimism that was followed up by most of the dailies including the
Mail
, which carried a substantial op-ed piece by a ‘self-confessed Victor Meldrew’ headlined: ‘Optimism? Bah humbug!’ For the
Mail
to follow you up was a considerable feather in your cap. Dave, the news editor, would be pleased.