Paradise City (27 page)

‘I remember, one night when I went to say goodnight to her – I always did that, you know, even when I was working crazy hours.’ The lines of Howard’s face soften slightly. For a second, he looks almost kind. ‘Ada must have been, what? Six or seven. She was a bit down, nothing obvious, just the way you can tell with kids. I said, “What’s wrong?” She goes, “Dad, I don’t want you and Mum to die.” It’s not normal for a kid to do that, is it?’ He pauses. ‘Sorry. Load of sentimental rubbish.’

‘No, no, not at all. This must be painful for you to talk about.’

‘It’s my choice to talk about it. The foundation, I mean. I wanted to do something positive.’ He pronounces ‘wanted’ as if it is missing all the consonants. It strikes a false note. She wonders if Howard is at pains to speak like this to accentuate his humble roots. There is something about it that seems phoney, like those politicians who use glottal stops to appear of the people even though they’ve had a public school education and a nanny since birth.

It would be so much better if he could be honest about himself, she thinks, if he had enough confidence in his own achievements to believe he was accepted. If he could get rid of that monstrous chip on his shoulder and stop caring so much about what other people thought of him. Why else would a man as powerful, as successful, as rich as Howard be so worried about his self-image that he got his PR man to call round all the newspaper picture desks and ask them to stop using a picture he didn’t think did him justice? It was absurd. And yet, beneath the absurdity, there was something real – a vulnerability, a need to be loved and admired.

‘I’ll never get over the loss of my daughter,’ Howard is saying. ‘Never. But at least this way there can be a lasting legacy, something that can benefit others.’

And all of a sudden, the intimacy is lost. Howard has moved on from his memories of Ada and sounds as though he is reciting a press release, as though someone has scripted exactly the words he should use. She knows Dave isn’t all that interested in the foundation and has used it as a wafer-thin excuse to secure the interview. But she has to be seen to play ball.

‘What do you want the foundation to achieve?’ she asks, resting her pen. She won’t need to take notes on this bit – hardly any of it will make the final edit. Sir Howard speaks fluently for the best part of ten minutes, rattling off a series of aims that seem generic and unfocused, tenuously linked together by the fact that Ada was fairly artistic and liked to paint. The foundation, he says, will raise private funding and distribute grants to after-school clubs on council estates and impoverished students who want to pursue arts degrees. It will also arrange trips to art galleries for under-privileged children. It will lobby the government for increased spending on the arts. It will provide adult education classes. It will pay for volunteers to go into hospitals, old people’s homes and nurseries and teach people ‘how to express themselves through the creative media’. It all sounds as right-on as it is possible to get. It also sounds ridiculously overambitious, but Esme isn’t about to tell him so.

‘And not just that,’ Howard carries on. Esme checks her watch discreetly. Twenty minutes of her allotted time have passed. ‘But I want to do some stuff with asylum seekers and refugees . . .’

‘Really?’ Esme asks. It doesn’t seem like an obvious fit: the unapologetic capitalist and the benefit-scroungers.

‘Yes. You know, I’ve met some people recently who have really changed my mind on this whole issue. There are terrible things going on in the world. Do you know it’s illegal to be gay in Uganda? They get stoned to death.’

Esme swallows drily. This was one direction she certainly hadn’t expected the conversation to go in. She wonders momentarily if he’s in the grip of a mid-life crisis, like those pinstriped bankers you sometimes read about in the Sunday supplements who give it all up to go and build bridges in Mongolian villages in an attempt to ‘find themselves’ in something other than the reflective surface of a gleaming Ferrari bonnet.

‘Sir Howard, if we could get back to—’

‘Sure, sure. But I just want to say one more thing: the way this country treats those people who are genuinely fleeing from dreadful regimes is an outrage. I’m not talking about the chancers who wanna come over here and get boob-jobs free on the NHS or whatever it is they do. I’m talking about the asylum seekers who have a genuine reason for being here.

‘I’m the son of immigrants. If they hadn’t been able to come to England, they’d have been marched off to the concentration camps and gassed to death. You’re too young to remember—’

It’s one of Esme’s pet hates when an older interviewee mentions her age in an attempt to undermine her but Howard is now in full flow: ‘This country’s built on fuc— on immigrants! I’d like some of the foundation’s funds to go towards supporting those guys who come to these shores wanting a better life for themselves and willing to work for it. I can relate to that.’

Esme waits. He seems finally to have come to a halt.

‘OK, understood,’ she says. ‘Do you think Ada would have liked the idea of the foundation? Would she be proud of you for establishing it?’

Howard exhales, pressing the air through his teeth. His face is tight again, closed off.

‘Who knows?’ He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. ‘I don’t know what kind of woman she’d be now. She’d be almost thirty. Maybe we’d have rows about stuff. Maybe she’d think I was a stupid old codger. Maybe I’d have a couple of grandkids – who knows?

‘Ada was beautiful . . .’ He drifts off. ‘But it was like she was born with a layer of skin missing, like she was too fragile for the world and she didn’t have a lot of confidence in herself and I wish, wish, wish I could have changed that. I tried. We both did, me and Penny.’

He coughs, takes a gulp of his latte. The only sign of his emotion is a slight strangulation of the voice, as though he is physically having to push each word out.

‘We were good parents, I’m 100 per cent sure of that. Whatever was written in the papers after she disappeared, I know we did our best. But the worst part is the not knowing. Not knowing if she’s dead or alive. The cruelty of that . . . is indescribable. I don’t think the words exist to explain what that’s like, I really don’t.’

He looks at Esme.

‘She was the light of my life. This little girl with this . . . this wrinkle, I guess you’d call it . . . a frown . . . just . . . a funny frown, playing with her dollies. She used to make them sandwiches, you know? Spread the bread with honey then stick a pile of Smarties on top to make it look like a cake.’

He chuckles, then snaps out of the reverie and sweeps the emotion aside, becoming businesslike again. She has never met anyone who can switch so easily from one state to the next, as though flicking through a filing cabinet of compartmentalised feeling. What must it be like to live that way, Esme thinks. How can he remember who he truly is in the midst of trying to display so many different fronts to the world?

‘There were rumours that she was on drugs,’ Esme says. ‘The police found evidence—’

Howard cuts her off. ‘No,’ he says, eyes narrowed. ‘You should check your information.’

‘I thought it was reported at the time . . .’

He turns on her.

‘I don’t give a flying fuck what was reported at the time,’ he says, voice raised to the level just below a full-throttled shout, jabbing his finger at her across the coffee table. ‘I’m telling you, as her father, Ada never touched the stuff.’ He leans back. The triangle of skin at the open V of his shirt has turned bright red. ‘Next question.’

Esme tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Her hand is shaking. She mustn’t let him see that she is cowed. But before she can ask the next question, Howard is speaking again, his voice semi-apologetic, his mood inexplicably calmer.

‘Listen, I just want some good to come of it all,’ he says, leaning forward, propping his elbows on his knees and seeking out her sightline. ‘Chances are, I’ll never know what happened to my daughter but the foundation is my way of making something positive come out of it all.’

Esme takes a sip of her coffee, the cup clattering noisily against the saucer as she replaces it. Howard flinches. She needs to give him something of her own, to make him feel as though she is sharing too.

‘I don’t know if you remember that lunch we had a while back—’

‘Course I do.’

‘I told you that I’d lost my dad when I was younger. My mum . . . I think she finds Christmas the hardest day of the year. Or even his birthday, because it reminds her, I suppose, of everything she’s missing.’

Howard is nodding.

‘Do you feel the same?’

‘Yeah, to an extent,’ he says. Silence.

‘Do you mark Ada’s birthday in any special way?’

His right foot starts tapping against the floor. He seems perturbed by this question. Once again, Esme wonders why he is doing this interview when he seems so against the idea of opening up.

‘Yeah,’ Howard says. ‘I haven’t ever spoken about this before so it’s hard, you need to bear with me.’ He coughs. His leg twitches. He sighs – a long whistle like a tyre deflating.

‘Penny and I meet up at TGI Friday’s in Kingston,’ he says. ‘It was where we took Ada every year for her birthday when she was a kid. She loved it there. The waiters always used to give her balloons and she loved the ice-cream sundae.’

He sniffs.

‘We go there, just the two of us, and we order the same food every year even though neither of us ever feels like eating it. And we talk about Ada, about our memories, stuff like that. One of the hardest things for both of us has been the idea that it was always going to end up like this, you know? I mean, I’m Jewish by birth and I don’t have much truck with God, not any more, but there’s a bit of me that wonders if there is such a thing as fate and, if there is, was it always written that Ada would disappear off the face of the earth at the age of nineteen? What kind of a sick, perverted joke is that? What did either of us do – me or Penny – to deserve it? I don’t know. I truly don’t know.’

‘It’s good that you and Penny can still do that together though, in spite of the divorce,’ Esme ventures.

‘Yeah,’ Howard nods. ‘We’ve only got each other, really. We’re the only ones who know what we’re going through. Claudia has her . . .’ He searches for the right word. ‘Qualities, but she doesn’t get it . . . why would she? I can’t expect her to.’

The coffee has cooled. Outside, the clear skies have turned grey. Rain spits against the window. Howard looks exhausted. There are shiny pouches under his eyes and he has slumped in on himself as though his muscles have given up, as though the effort of appearing normal requires too much energy, too much honesty.

The dictaphone bleeps and stutters. Esme jumps. She feels grubby, as she often does at the end of interviews where she has exploited a briskly established closeness. It is a false conversation, this circular question and answer. A carefully scripted play masquerading as spontaneity, with neither of the main actors willing to acknowledge the fakery of it.

The art of the interviewer, Esme knows, is to coax the emotion of the interviewee to the surface, casting off with a wriggling question and letting the bait glitter and skim on the water until they have taken it and been hooked. And part of Howard has been grateful to be hooked, she knows that. Everyone wants to talk, deep down. But still she feels cheapened. She wonders what would happen if she switched the dictaphone off and threw her notes away and talked to Howard normally. Would she be able to drill down through the complex, interconnecting layers of his manufactured identity to get to the truth of who he really was? Did he even know? Could he remember what it was to be honest about himself? Or was he scared of what he might find if he did so?

‘There’s something I’d like you to see,’ Howard says, not looking at her but picking instead at a minuscule speck of fluff on his sleeve.

She waits.

‘I thought it might be helpful for you to see Ada as she was. When she was alive, I mean.’

‘I don’t—’

‘I’ve got an old family video, you see. It’s – it was made for my fiftieth birthday. She was fifteen . . .’

He looks up, eyes cloudy, mouth blurred.

‘But, you know, it might not interest you. You might feel you have all you need. Or that it would be a bit—’ He pauses, rests his hands on his knees. ‘Spooky.’

‘No,’ Esme says, too quickly. ‘No, I mean, yes. I’d be honoured to look at it. If you don’t mind.’

‘Good. The screening room is all set up for you. I’ll get Theresa to take you down.’

‘You won’t be—’

Howard shakes his head. ‘I can’t.’

Theresa leads her down a narrow staircase to the basement. They emerge in a short corridor lined with movie stills –
Carry On
film posters emblazoned with a semi-clad Barbara Windsor in a nurse’s uniform; a black-and-white James Stewart from
It’s a Wonderful Life
; a screaming Tippi Hedren surrounded by silhouetted cows. The house is cooler down here, with the chill of damp in the air. The carpet is frayed at the edges and there are stacks of paper folders piled haphazardly along some metal bookshelves. It looks unfinished, as though someone had run out of energy to decorate. She doesn’t believe in ghosts, but there is a sense of absence so pervasive that Esme feels she could reach out and grab it and squeeze it into a hard ball in the palm of her hand.