Paradise City (26 page)

Esme buzzes the security phone. She checks her reflection in the shiny glass panel before noticing, too late, that it shields a camera and whoever lets her in on the other side of the red-brick wall will have seen her preening and pouting.

‘Shit,’ she murmurs, trying to ignore her nerves. She is more panicked about this than she was for her first ever interview (it had been with a woman called Annette whose dancing Labrador had got through to the semi-finals of
Britain’s Got Talent
). Dave, who hadn’t even mentioned their drink last Monday, had ordered her gruffly ‘to calm down and stop acting like you’re sitting your A levels all over again.’

He couldn’t look at her directly when he spoke. Instead, he angled his head so that she could only make out a sideways glimpse of his eyes.

Having been buzzed through the gates, Esme walks up an uneven path to a large carved oak door, shrouded by thick coils of wisteria. Standing on the front step, she unclips her hair, shakes it out over her shoulders and smiles in readiness. A pudgy-cheeked Asian woman opens the door, ushers her into the hallway and tells her to leave her coat on the hat-stand provided. The woman is wearing clothes that are presumably intended to be a uniform but look more like surgical scrubs. The blue nylon rustles as she leads Esme into the living room and shows her which chair to sit in.

‘Sir Howard will be with you shortly,’ the woman says. Her accent is foreign. The room smells of geranium-scented candle.

Esme takes out her notepad, her dictaphone and her sheet of questions, carefully constructed over the last couple of days and scribbled down in shorthand on the back of Howard’s printed-out Wikipedia entry. Esme knows proper journalists aren’t supposed to use Wikipedia but she can’t help herself. She clears her throat, scratches the inside of her wrist, waits.

Howard Pink’s living room is, like the man himself, overstuffed and expensive. Two enormous red velvet sofas face each other across a low coffee table on which someone has arranged a fan of auction catalogues from Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Behind her, there is a large fire, laid with wooden logs and dark pellets of coal despite the mildness of the day and crested by a marble mantelpiece with gold-leaf detailing. Faux Ming china bowls of potpourri jostle for space on every available surface. There are mottled paintings of elderly ancestral types on the walls, a gloomy country scene in oils with a horse and cart in the foreground and one small but exquisite watercolour of a swimming pool in high summer. To one side, a bay window overlooks a broad expanse of flower beds and the faint outline of a pale green gazebo. In front of the window is a polished sideboard, the surface of which is filled with a selection of photographs.

She is too far away to make out who is smiling from the silver frames and she wonders, briefly, whether she can risk getting up to have a look before Sir Howard arrives. Esme squints. There are a few of Howard Pink shaking hands with various luminaries. One of them looks like Mick Jagger. There is a black-and-white wedding photo. Judging from the style of the dress, she thinks it’s probably his parents. She is fairly sure there is one of Ada, front and centre, her face peeking out from underneath a heavy fringe, smiling uncertainly at the lens. She makes a mental note to tell Les to take a picture of it. Just as she is about to walk over to take a closer look, the door swings open and Howard walks in.

‘Esme, great to see you again,’ he says, coming towards her with an arm outstretched. When she takes it to shake his hand, he leans in and kisses her on both cheeks. He has dressed relatively informally for this occasion: a pink shirt, open at the neck, blue chinos and brown suede loafers.

‘Do you have any coffee?’ he asks, before she can launch into her pre-interview spiel about how much she appreciates him giving up his time.

‘No, but . . .’

‘Well you must. Where is Theresa when you need her?’ He goes to the door, leans into the hallway and bellows, ‘Theresaaaa!’ The woman who greeted Esme appears instantly like a hologram. ‘Can you get us some coffee, please? Esme, what’ll it be?’

‘Just a normal black coffee, thanks.’

‘Black coffee for the lady. Latte for me. Skimmed milk.’ Howard pats his belly. ‘Claudia’s got me on a health kick.’ He winks, then plonks himself down on the sofa opposite Esme, the impact of his weight causing the cushions to judder and belch out a cloud of dust.

‘Thanks for coming,’ he says. Esme looks at him carefully. There is something not right about him today, a discordant note sounding at the edge of her thoughts. He is grinning at her but his eyes shift and flicker as he does so. He is agitated, she thinks. But why would someone be agitated if he had nothing to hide?

‘Now,’ he says. ‘How long do you think this’ll take?’

‘I told your secretary it would be an hour for the interview and forty minutes for the portrait.’

He snorts. ‘Forty minutes! What’s he going to do? Paint me?’

‘I think he just wants to get something new. We’ve only got old shots of you on file and they’re a bit corporate. This is a more personal piece, so . . .’

‘I mean, Christ!’ Howard continues, talking over her. ‘It’ll be enough to put your readers off their breakfasts.’ He guffaws loudly, throwing his head back so that a tuft of chest hair appears at the open V of his shirt then slides back underneath the buttoned fabric.

He crosses one leg over the other exposing his crotch area and looks out of the window as though some object in the garden is demanding the entirety of his attention.

She wonders how she should play this. The room feels electrified and stifling, as though Howard’s nervous energy has pumped through the air-conditioning system and pushed out all the oxygen. If she is too direct, he will be angry. If she is too pliant, he will take advantage. She needs to strike a balance between deference and alertness.

‘I know you’re very busy, Sir Howard,’ Esme begins, allowing herself to sound tentative, a bit nervous herself, ‘and I really appreciate you giving up your time, so I’ll get cracking if you’re ready?’

Howard nods.

She places her dictaphone on the coffee table between them, presses ‘record’ and checks that the red light is winking at her. ‘Is Rupert . . . ?’

‘Rupert’s not coming. I wanted to do this on my own.’

Esme gets out her notepad to jot things down as he talks, balances it on her knee and then looks across at him, trying to engage him with what she hopes is a friendly smile.

‘OK, well, Sir Howard—’

‘Call me Howard.’

‘Howard. Perhaps you could start off by telling me what the motivation was behind setting up this foundation?’

A nice, open-ended question to get him going, she thinks. Fairly anodyne, gives him the chance to bang on about charitable giving and emphasise his social conscience.

‘I wanted to do something in memory of my daughter,’ Sir Howard says, picking a stray hair off the knee of his trousers, affecting a kind of boredom. He looks at her and smiles briefly, the shape of it disappearing and leaving no trace. Esme waits, expecting him to continue but when he doesn’t she is thrown and stammers to try and fill the gap in conversation.

‘Um, OK, yes. But, er, why now particularly, Sir – I mean, Howard?’

He sighs.

‘It felt like enough time had elapsed. In the immediate aftermath of her . . . her disappearance, I guess you’d say, I wasn’t in a fit state to do anything much. But it’s been eleven years now, and I suppose I have to face the fact that Ada isn’t coming back.’ There is a pause. ‘I mean, she could be dead. Probably is.’

The abruptness of that statement, the baldness of it, throws her off balance. He looks out of the window again. Esme chooses not to say anything, deliberately waiting to see whether Sir Howard will carry on. Sometimes the canniest thing to do in an interview is to stay silent.

Finally, he turns to look at her and she notices his eyes are watery and there is a stubborn wrinkle above his brow. She feels a leap of surprised excitement: tears make good copy, she thinks before she can stop herself. A vision of her mother with a glum, disappointed look on her face rises in Esme’s mind. Empathy, she reminds herself. Be empathetic. But be objective too. And don’t get so emotional about it. Remember what Dave says: the interview isn’t about you, it’s about the person you’re interviewing.

A light sweat breaks out across her brow. How on earth is anyone meant to do all of that and still give the impression of holding a casual conversation? Interviews are a bloody nightmare.

She lowers her head, scribbles a nonsensical loop of shorthand on her notepad and gathers her thoughts. She can hear Howard breathing: a weighted space rising and falling on the other side of the table. And instead of remembering all the things she should be doing to move the interview on, Esme remembers sitting at her father’s hospital bed, listening to the mechanical judder of the ventilator, looking at his bruised and swollen face and his body covered with tubes. She remembers holding her brother’s hand, trying not to breathe in too much of the hospital disinfectant smell because she was worried she might faint. She remembers her mother: the emptiness of her expression; the hollow shock of her face.

The next question forms itself with perfect clarity.

‘But no matter how much time passes,’ Esme says, ‘I can’t imagine you get over a grief like that.’

He shakes his head.

‘No, you’re right. And of course, it’s not a conventional grief. I mean, I’ve lost good friends in the past. My mum died so I know what it’s like to mourn someone you love. But we, Penny and I – Penny’s my first wife – we can’t mourn. We don’t know what happened to Ada. There’s no grave to visit. So it’s . . . well, an open wound. Yeah. It never heals.’ He breaks off. ‘Sorry. I’m just not used to, you know, talking about this . . .’

‘Your mum was also called Ada, wasn’t she? Did you name your daughter . . .’

‘After her? Yeah. I loved my mum. Had the greatest of respect for her. She raised me single-handed after my dad walked out and I wasn’t always the best behaved.’

He gives another gruff burst of laughter. Interesting, Esme thinks, that there was an absent father. She is struck by yet another unexpected similarity between them. She’s noticed that a lot of successful, driven, high-powered types are from single-parent families. There’s something about needing to prove yourself to the one who left, needing to get their love and approval in different ways because you feel you weren’t enough to keep them there in the first place.

‘She sounds like a strong woman,’ Esme ventures.

He nods. ‘Could be terrifying when she was angry. Terrifying. I’ve never met anyone who could make me as scared as she could, and I include the vast majority of CEOs in that.’

His voice dips and he looks away, rubbing the back of his neck. The carefully combed grey strands at the nape dislodge and tangle. When he removes his hand, his fingertips are greased with gel.

‘But she loved me,’ he says. ‘I always knew she loved me deeply. And without her, I wouldn’t be . . .’

The door opens and Theresa comes in rattling a tray filled with silverware.

‘Ah,’ says Howard, instantly switching from self-reflection to showy bonhomie. ‘At bloody last. A man could die of thirst round here. Ooh biscuits,’ he continues as he alights on a plate of chocolate Bourbons. ‘Lovely jubbly.’

Esme writes: ‘Choc Bourbons’ in her notepad. She might be able to make something of that in the piece: use it as a means of conveying that Sir Howard, for all his wealth, is still a simple man at heart who doesn’t like to stand on ceremony, et cetera, et cetera. No Duchy Original stem-ginger biscuits for him.

He offers the plate to her.

‘No thanks.’

‘Why not? You’re not on a diet, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Good. In my day, girls had a bit of meat on them. It’s terrible the pressure you young girls have to stay thin.’

Theresa scuttles out of the room.

‘Of course you’ve got personal experience of having seen your daughter go through anorexia,’ Esme says, seizing on the chance to get the interview back on track. It’s a clumsy way to do it but she’s running out of time.

Howard stares at her. He places the plate of biscuits back on the coffee tray without taking one. When he looks at her again, he seems to have made some kind of deal with himself, he seems to have decided to trust her.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Ada struggled with loads of stuff.’

A pause. Outside, the tinny whine of an ambulance siren. Howard shifts in his seat.

‘I don’t like to look back, to be honest. I try not to do it too much. Don’t think it does any good, dwelling on the things you can’t change. But I have asked myself recently if Ada was ever really happy.’

Esme waits.

‘That’s a hard thing to say about your own child, because all you want to give them is happiness and love. To make them feel secure.’ He pauses, sips his latte. ‘Do you have kids?’

She shakes her head.

‘I just think maybe she had something missing, some chemical, some imbalance. I didn’t use to believe in depression. Thought it was all a load of bollocks. Made up by psychiatrists who want to tell you it’s all because your mum didn’t love you or whatever. But, actually, I don’t think she had the capacity for happiness. Even when she was little. She was always so . . . so uptight. Anxious. Couldn’t relax. Always very aware of herself, of what other people thought of her.