Paradise City (23 page)

Howard clicks on his Rolex and sweeps back his hair, patting the sides of it flat against his temples with pomade. In front of the bathroom mirror, he bends down to monitor his spreading bald patch. Claudia has recently been dropping hints about hair transplant surgery, talking loudly about so-and-so’s ‘fine head of hair’ whenever they pass a virile man on the street or see a hirsute middle-aged presenter on television. The other day, she had pointedly left a copy of the
Daily Mail
on the coffee table downstairs, folded over so that an advertisement for Regaine stared out at him in black-and-white.

Still, not much he can do about it today, he thinks, sucking in his stomach and slapping it proprietorially.

He goes downstairs, following the scent of freshly ground coffee and boiling eggs all the way to the kitchen. On weekdays, he likes to eat his breakfast here, skimming through the business pages while the cook rustles up whatever it is he feels like eating. If she’s not doing an early morning workout or having her eyelashes aromatherapised or whatever, Claudia will join him. They sleep in separate rooms and have done for the last two years. It happened without either of them remarking on it. Bit by bit, Claudia had simply moved her clothes into the rose-papered boudoir on the other side of their shared bathroom. She told Howard she slept better without having to put up with his snoring. He felt rejected but unable to admit this to her. He wondered, from time to time, whether she sought sexual satisfaction elsewhere. There was a Spanish personal trainer he’d had his suspicions about a while back – all ripped pectorals and olive-skinned charm and tales about how to make the perfect paella like his mama taught him – but most of the time, she seemed curiously asexual. Possibly she was too self-absorbed to give herself to anyone else.

Today, Howard’s heart sinks when he sees his wife already at the table, eating tiny segments from half a grapefruit and drinking a virulent green substance from a long, tall glass. Penny used to eat a bowl of Special K with a strong cup of sweet, milky tea. He tries, as much as possible, not to compare his second wife with his first but, before he can stop it, the thought is out there and a disappointment seeps into him.

Claudia is flicking through a glossy magazine, her nails painted a bright coral colour. She makes a point of pretending not to notice him walk through the door.

‘Good morning, Sir Howard,’ says the cook. He can’t remember her name. He thinks it begins with a B.

‘Morning.’

Claudia glances up at him, decides to smile and offers her cheek for a peck. Howard dutifully obliges.

‘Well this is nice,’ says Claudia in a tone that suggests precisely the opposite. ‘Quality time with my husband. Perhaps we can finally have a chat about the drawing-room wallpaper?’

Claudia wants to redecorate. She says the whole house is too gloomy and that the furniture is evidence of his ex-wife’s lack of taste. He can’t be bothered to get into the conversation. And besides, he rather likes the way the house looks. It is, after all, his home. I’m paying for it, he thinks.

‘Actually, darling, I’m not stopping for breakfast today,’ he says, inventing the lie as he goes. ‘I’ve got an early meeting in the office. Board members, you know how it is.’

Claudia looks at her watch.

‘It’s only 7.30.’

‘Time and . . . and . . . whatever it is . . . waits for no man . . .’

‘Tide,’ Claudia says drily, going back to her magazine.

He suppresses the urge to say something. He doesn’t know how he’d retaliate anyway. She’s always been quicker than he is with words. If only their fights were played out through balance sheets, he thinks, he’d win every time.

‘What’s that?’ he says, gesturing at the green liquid.

‘Spirulina. Wheatgrass. Spinach juice.’

He rolls his eyes. Claudia, falling into the familiar role play that has become their public shtick, slaps him playfully on the hand.

‘You should try it, Howie. Do you good.’

‘No thanks. I’d rather drink my own piss.’

The cook giggles.

‘See you later,’ he says.

Claudia raises her hand in a half-hearted wave. The cook beams at him. He can already hear the soft growl of the Bentley outside.

Jocelyn drives him to Kensington, avoiding all traffic jams with the sort of sixth sense that seems to be the preserve of certain chauffeurs. Howard can see his driver glancing at him through the rear-view mirror. Jocelyn’s always been astute: not much gets past him. ‘Everything all right, Sir Howard?’ Jocelyn says from the front seat.

‘Fine, thanks.’ He looks pointedly out of the window to avoid further conversation. The High Street is filling up with harried commuters trying to cross the road in the midst of perilously speeding cars and buses. A few years ago, the council had decided to remove a sizeable proportion of traffic lights in the misguided belief that pedestrians would use their common sense to cross at the safest place. Instead, Howard noticed, they just walked wherever they bloody well liked, convinced that drivers would screech to a halt in time. There is a man with a giant backpack weaving in and out of the exhaust fumes right now with a stupid grin on his face, waving apologetically at a white-van man. Tourists, thinks Howard with a mental snarl. Waste of space. He’s probably Australian, come over here to clutter up Howard’s local every time there was a rugby match.

He remembers Ada telling him that she had got work pulling pints in a pub in Birmingham in her first term at university. He didn’t like the thought of it and had told her so.

‘If you’re short of cash, you only need to ask.’

Ada had looked at him critically, her head tilted to one side just like her mother.

‘Dad, it’s not about the money.’

‘Why are you doing it then?’

She sighed, blowing out her cheeks for exaggerated effect. Her face was still too thin: the dip and curve of the bone pressing against her pale skin.

‘I like it, Dad! It’s nice. Meeting new people. Doing something for myself.’

She’d leaned across the table and patted his hand. Her fingers felt cold and bony. The faintest tinge of blue underneath each nail. He smiled.

‘Whatever makes you happy, sweetheart,’ he’d said – and he’d meant it too.

When was that, he thinks now, leaning back against the comforting indentations of the Bentley’s leather upholstery. He remembers they’d been talking about the Millennium celebrations, the fireworks along the Thames, the fear of some catastrophic computer bug paralysing the country . . . it must have been early 2001, one of the last times he saw her. How long ago it seemed, and yet how immediate. It would have been before September 11. Before the world changed, he thinks, and although it causes him an instant of guilt, he cannot help but put a personal gloss on events. When the Twin Towers had been attacked, he had looked at the television screen, he had looked at that blue, blue sky, at the plane, the clouds of dust, the crumpling of steel and stone, the jumping bodies, and he had felt less than he should have. He had thought simply that at last the exterior world now reflected the anguish he felt inside. He had drawn the comparison without realising he was doing so and for a few days after it happened, he remembers feeling relief that so many other people now understood his pain, that he didn’t have to explain. For a while, there was a synthesis between internal and external landscapes that had temporarily removed the necessity to carry on as normal.

Jocelyn brakes, jolting Howard out of his reverie. He scratches the back of his neck. He has to focus. He needs to think about what he is going to say to this woman, this Beatrice Kizza. In truth, he hasn’t formulated a clear plan of action. He knows Rupert is anxious about the meeting, that he thinks it foolhardy for Howard to sully his hands in the matter.

‘Even to be seen in the same room as her is
madness
,’ his PR man had said when Howard asked him to arrange it. They were in his office at Paradiso HQ. Howard was at his desk, swivelling his chair round to look out of the floor-to-ceiling windows at a desultory stretch of West London scrubland. Rupert sat opposite, his legs crossed, his quiff gelled to one side. ‘I strongly advise you . . .’

Howard held his hands up: a familiar gesture that was half conciliatory, half cautionary.

‘I know what you’re going to say, Rupe. I don’t need you to lecture me. I’ve made my mind up.’

Rupert shook his head but he knew his boss. Howard would not be prised away from his ill-advised course of action. The best Rupert could do was to make the legal situation watertight and to ensure that Beatrice Kizza wasn’t seen anywhere near the Paradiso offices. He had booked a suite in the Royal Garden. Howard snorted with laughter when Rupert told him.

‘A fucking hotel room, Rupert? Jesus. Never let it be said you don’t have a sense of humour.’

Rupert widened his eyes. ‘It’s the best option. I know the manager at the Royal Garden. I can rely on him.’

‘OK, OK. And she’s coming? You’ve spoken to her?’

Rupert nodded. ‘I’ve set up that interview too, with the journo from the
Tribune
.’

‘Jesus.’ Howard turned back to his desk, picked up a bright pink rubbery ball that was meant to help stressed-out executives and squeezed it tight in his fist, releasing it after a few seconds as if massaging a dying heart.

‘No, Esme Reade,’ Rupert replied, allowing himself a small smile at his own joke. ‘We’ve discussed this, Howard. It’s a good diversionary tactic. You give a warm, personal interview, announce you’re setting up a foundation in Ada’s memory, that Esme was the only hack you could have trusted with this sensitive piece, flatter her, give her the old twinkle. Then show her round Chateau Pink, feed her some touchy-feely stuff about living in the present but never forgetting the past, pose for a pic with the fragrant Claudia and there you have it.’

Howard knew it made sense. He had never spoken about Ada to the press before. But he is a pragmatist. He can give Esme Reade enough for her article without cheapening his most private memories. He is adept at creating a narrative. After all, he has been doing it most of his life.

The Bentley swings round into the Royal Garden Hotel driveway and slips seamlessly to a halt. Jocelyn gets out, puts on the peaked cap that Claudia insists on as part of the chauffeur’s uniform, and opens the back passenger door.

‘Here you are, Sir Howard,’ Jocelyn smiles reassuringly. ‘I hope you have a good meeting.’

He climbs out of the car, groaning lightly as he unfolds his stiffening muscles, and Howard notices that Jocelyn smells familiar. For a moment he is confused. Then he realises his chauffeur is wearing the same Aqua di Parma aftershave that Howard splashes on each morning. He grins. He’s always seen imitation as the best kind of flattery, reinforcing, as it does, the notion of his own importance. He pats Jocelyn on the shoulder. I won’t mention it, he thinks, don’t want to embarrass the poor man.

He rolls back his shoulders, twists his neck from side to side as if limbering up for a fight and then walks through the rotating glass doors. Rupert meets him at reception and takes him up to a small suite on the ninth floor. They do not talk. Down the corridor, Rupert slides the plastic card key into the slot and pushes the door open into a room with overplumped sofas. There is an adjoining bedroom with an overplumped bed and a narrow bathroom with overplumped towels. Howard sucks in his abdomen reflexively. He feels overplumped himself, despite his lack of breakfast.

‘I thought you could sit here, Sir Howard,’ Rupert says, shifting one of the armchairs so that it faces the door. ‘Best to be standing when she walks in though, make sure she knows who’s in charge.’

‘Right. And I’ll teach my gran to suck eggs at the same time, shall I?’ Howard snaps. He is surprised at how nervous he is.

Rupert looks stricken. ‘Sorry, Rupe. Bit on edge.’

‘You don’t have to do this, you know . . .’

‘No,’ Howard says, cutting him off. ‘I do.’

He thinks back to that day in the Mayfair Rotunda and wonders, with disgust, how it came to this. Did he misread the chambermaid’s signals? Or had he allowed himself a moment of wilful blindness? Did he know what he was doing was wrong or had there been something more nebulous at work, an innate belief that women like her were there precisely for men like him to relieve themselves away from their wives? Does that make him a grubby little pervert? He isn’t sure any more. He see-saws from feeling he has been unfairly attacked to an all-encompassing sense of self-loathing. He genuinely hadn’t wanted to cause this Beatrice Kizza woman any distress. Genuinely. And he is mortified, too, that what should have been a time for sober contemplation of his daughter’s disappearance has now become indelibly sullied in his mind.

He tells himself he wants to make amends for any distress he has caused but, even more pressingly, he wants to salve his own conscience. He wants to wipe the slate clean, turn over a new leaf, start a new chapter – all those irritating phrases that he has dismissed for years as New Age mumbo-jumbo. He wants to be someone better than he has become. He wants to be worthy of the fact Jocelyn has chosen to ape his style. He wants to be what he isn’t. He is sure he used to be nicer, more naïve, more open to the world. Surely he can get that back?

Or is he kidding himself? Perhaps, he thinks, perhaps I’ve always been this brash, uncaring, selfish husk of a man. Perhaps that was why everyone he loved had left him – Ada, Penny, his father who walked out one day for bagels and never came back (at least, that’s what his mother told him. Howard had never been entirely convinced. It was the bagel detail he found inauthentic).