Paradise City (31 page)

‘It’s not too demanding,’ Tracy is saying and while she speaks, she pats the back of her hair proprietorially. ‘Sir Howard gets such a lot of post that he needs someone to read through it for him and sort it into piles.’ She glances at Beatrice. ‘You’ll be such a help. I can’t think why we haven’t thought of it before.’

Beatrice nods. She notices the way Tracy says ‘we’ as though she is talking about a family.

‘There are some people who write with a complaint about an item of clothing that they’ve bought in one of our stores,’ Tracy carries on. ‘These are Priority A letters which you should organise chronologically and mark for Sir Howard’s personal attention.’ Tracy breaks off, drops her voice and confides conspiratorially, ‘He likes to answer those ones himself. He’s done it as long as I’ve known him. Amazing really, the pride he takes . . .’

She looks at Beatrice, who realises she is expected to murmur her assent and does so.

‘Then there’ll be the green ink brigade.’

‘Green ink?’ Beatrice asks, sipping on her tea which is strong and sweet.

‘The ones who’ve got a screw loose, who say they hear voices through the TV, that it’s all part of some big government plot . . . that kind of thing. Those ones go straight in the bin.’

Beatrice nods.

‘Then you’ve got to use your own judgement for the final two categories. Some letters will be OK with a template response: “Dear Sir, Thank you for your correspondence. Unfortunately not enough time to reply to all personally, et cetera.” I’ll show you where to find that on the computer. Then there’ll be others who might raise something specific that isn’t directly to do with the clothing and you should mark those in a file for the complaints department.’

Tracy reaches across the table and touches Beatrice lightly on her forearm. ‘Do you want a biscuit? You look like you could do with a bit of sugar.’ Without waiting for an answer, Tracy opens the cupboard underneath the sink, sliding out a large Quality Street tin with a white label on it. The label reads: ‘Tracy’s Biscuits. For Emergencies Only’.

Beatrice picks a cookie that looks expensive – full of nuts and big chunks of chocolate. She bites into it quickly, irrationally anxious in case it will be taken back – in case Tracy made a mistake in offering her the nice ones. The biscuit tastes as good as it looks. She washes it down with her tea and feels warm for the first time in days.

‘There you go,’ Tracy says, satisfied. ‘Beatrice is a lovely name. Lovely. Does anyone call you Bea?’

Beatrice shakes her head. ‘You can though,’ she says, to her own surprise. She has never liked it when people shorten her name. It doesn’t sound right – too insubstantial, too fly-away. But Tracy has been so nice to her, so open, that she feels like giving her something back.

Tracy blushes: a pinkness that creeps up from her clavicles to the tips of her ears.

‘Thank you.’ She smiles. ‘I think we’re going to get along just fine, don’t you?’

Howard

Howard likes top hats. He has always been a man who appreciates the finer points of style. He’s not a poof or anything like that, although he’s got nothing against them. Some of the finest tailors he knows are that way inclined and Howard has been to no fewer than three civil partnership ceremonies in the past twenty-four months. The latest one, a stylish registry-office affair in Marylebone followed by a reception at Claridge’s, had required guests to stick to a ‘1920s
Great Gatsby
’ dress code. Claudia had worn a sequinned flapper dress bought at vast expense from a vintage boutique in Portobello and soaked through with the metallic aroma of ancient mothballs. Howard had worn black tie, which he thought was concession enough. He’d never read
The Great Gatsby
. Thought novels were a waste of time, to be honest.

So the point was, he knew how to dress up. He understood it. It was about presenting the best side of yourself, being the best you could be. It was about giving an impression of yourself you wanted the world to understand. He knew how important it was to dress with precision for a business meeting – not too flash, eloquence in the details – and he knew how to dress for a day at the races. A top hat was required.

It is a shame, he believes, that the top hat has fallen out of fashion in recent years. These days, its only function is to provide a useful graphic shorthand for political caricaturists who wanted to underline the fact that the Prime Minister and half his Cabinet went to Eton.

Thank God, he thinks, for Royal Ascot. He doesn’t get that excited by horse racing but he leaps at any chance to dust down the stretched black silk of his topper and this year he’d been invited as the guest of an online betting company whose chief executive had just made a substantial contribution to the Paradiso Charitable Giving Fund.

This is why he finds himself sporting a top hat, on one of the wettest days of the summer, sitting at a table laid with dainty blue gift bags and matching flowers and dishes containing iced curls of butter. To the left, sliding windows open onto the racecourse, overshadowed by a leaden grey sky. When they had stood outside to watch the first race, one of the female guests had shrieked excitedly that she could see the Queen in the adjoining box, which led to a flurry of camera phones and flashes. Howard couldn’t make out much beyond a blurry shadow and a twinkle of light that might or might not have been a reflection from her spectacles. He thought there was something undignified about gawping but then he’d met the Queen several times already so didn’t feel the need to stare.

Her Majesty had made little impression on him beyond her extreme shortness and yet he had found himself nervous on each occasion, fumbling the bow and running out of anything to say. He wouldn’t mind meeting Kate Middleton though. Or the Duchess of Cambridge as he was meant to call her these days. She was a gorgeous girl. Classy, too. A sensory flash of memory comes back to him of her slender arms, decked in intricate lace on her wedding day. He can remember the precise quality of her skin seen through the TV camera lens: a dimmed pinkish-brown, veiled by the most delicate ivory gauze. Her dress was simply one of the most perfect pieces of clothing he’d ever seen: both for the bride and the occasion. It trailed a sense of history behind it. He wishes he had seen Ada get married, soft-cheeked and smiling and sheathed in wedding white.

Although for all he knows, she would have got married dressed as a Goth just to spite him: all black eyeliner, ripped jeans and inappropriate piercings.

He has been thinking about Ada a lot since the interview with Esme Reade. He’d been more affected by the encounter than he’d expected. Esme Reade might have looked sweet-faced and innocent, but she had this way of asking a question that was both guileless and penetrating, and he had found himself saying more than he’d wanted to. Once or twice, he’d been close to tears, even though, when Rupert had suggested the interview, he’d been sure he could handle it.

The piece was due to appear this Sunday and Howard was bracing himself for its publication, hoping he wouldn’t have embarrassed himself. He had a horror of showing sentimentality in public. He didn’t want strangers looking at pictures of his daughter, treating her as a story, just newsprint on a page. He’d tried to talk to Claudia about it but she hadn’t been particularly sympathetic.

‘Why on earth did you agree to it in the first place?’ she had said this morning. He had found her hunched over her iPhone in her study in the process of uploading flattering photos of herself to Facebook. ‘You need to focus on the future, Howie, and not be a prisoner to your past.’

‘Where’d you read that?’

‘
Bedside Yoga Gems
,’ Claudia said. ‘It’s a very helpful book. You should flick through it sometime.’ A pause. ‘Not many pictures though, which might put you off.’

The only thing Claudia cared about was that Les, the
Tribune
photographer, had captured her best angle. On the day of the interview, she had appeared wearing a tight, fuchsia-coloured dress and a diamond ring the size of a lychee. She had insisted on looking at each shot as it was taken, demanding he delete any of the ones that made her look ‘fat’, ‘saggy’ or ‘old’. When Esme had intervened to say maybe it would be quicker if they just sent a selection at a later date for approval, Claudia had snapped at her.

‘Who does she think she is?’ Claudia hissed at Howard. ‘The little madam.’

He sighs without meaning to, feeling the swell and drop of his stomach underneath the leather belt he has optimistically done up a notch too tightly. He takes off his top hat and a waiter appears soundlessly at his shoulder to relieve him of it. He is worried the hat has left a red band across his forehead where it sits a fraction too tightly and he tries, subtly, to rub at the mark with his fingers. Surely his head can’t have got bigger along with the rest of him? You can’t put on weight around your skull, can you? Isn’t it just made up of interlinking plates of bone?

Across the table, Claudia is looking bored. She is wearing a turquoise fascinator with bits of netting and looped feathers, each one adorned with a miniature pom-pom. Every time she moves her head, the whole thing shivers like a peacock left out in the cold. Ironic that it’s called a fascinator, Howard thinks. Claudia is being talked at by a moustached man with narrow eyes whom he vaguely recognises as the editor of a financial free-sheet and he’s never seen anyone look less fascinated in his life.

At the other end of the table, there is a blousy-looking PR woman who has already had too much to drink. Amy, she said her name was when they’d been introduced: pink lipstick leaking into the small crenellations around her mouth like sewage.

The remaining places are taken up with a smattering of mid-ranking businessmen and their other halves: overfed men and overdressed women all making underwhelming conversation.

Howard makes a stab at eating his starter of poached lobster and chicken cannelloni but he has no appetite. He leans forward to get his wine glass instead, raises the rim to his lips and knocks back the contents. The acidity kicks deep into the back of his throat. Claudia looks at him blankly. She used to look at him with disapproval but now she doesn’t even care enough to do that.

‘So, Howard, who are you backing in the next race?’ A voice cuts through. It belongs to Mike, the betting company CEO, who is a nice enough fellow. He means well. Howard does his best to be cheerful.

‘I was rather hoping you’d tell me that, Mike.’

Mike laughs uproariously. Howard flinches.

‘Haha! Well, I don’t mind telling you . . .’ Mike taps the side of his nose with one finger. ‘That a little bird told me Fellatio was the one to watch.’

Howard snorts. ‘Fellatio?’ he booms across the table so that the polite chatter is temporarily suspended. Amy, the PR woman, gasps dramatically then emits a shrill squeal of laughter. ‘What kind of name’s that?’ Howard asks, unsure why the atmosphere has warped and buckled.

Mike hesitates.

‘Haha! I think you misheard, old chap. Horatio, I said. That’s the horse’s name.’

The Amy woman is laughing so much she has to dab at her eyes with a paper tissue. Claudia gives an amused smile.

‘Oh you mustn’t mind Howie,’ she says, licking her lips. ‘He’s got a one-track mind, haven’t you, darling?’

Time was, Howard might have seen the funny side. He might even have been turned on by the salacious hint of challenge in Claudia’s eyes. As it is, he feels humiliated, deliberately cut down in public. He stares at her. The blood behind his eyes pulses hot. He can see the smile shrink and shrivel from her lips and he knows she realises she has gone too far. That, at least, gives him some satisfaction.

Mike is trying to gloss things over with some hearty banter about fillies and jockeys and odds-on favourites and it’s true that no one else seems to care and that perhaps Howard shouldn’t take it so much to heart but he can’t help it. He has always hated being made a fool of. Always. All his life he has been on guard against it, against the posh City boys who wanted to take him down a peg or two, against the public school toffs who knew he wasn’t from their side of the tracks, against the politicians who sneered at him because he wouldn’t kiss their arses and the Knightsbridge billionaires who looked down on him as a glorified barrow boy. Fuck ’em, he thinks, why should I care? But he does. And he can’t seem to stop himself from caring.

There is a prickle at the base of his spine. He shifts in his seat but the pins and needles spread to his buttocks. He has an urge to leave, to get back home and not have to pretend any longer that this is his milieu, that he fits in. He wants to go and watch a schmaltzy black-and-white film in his private cinema, the kind of film he used to watch with Penny, with tap-dancing men and girls with nipped-in waists and an uncomplicated sense of wonder at the world. Ada had grown up surrounded by those movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age. She loved them too. She used to insist on watching
It’s a Wonderful Life
the night before Christmas, even when she’d left school and he thought she’d be getting too old for sentimental nonsense like that. She was crazy about that film.

For her eighteenth birthday, a year before she’d gone missing, she’d asked half a dozen friends round for a black-tie cinema party so they could watch the film. Her eating disorder seemed to be under control at last and he’d been so relieved she wanted to mark the occasion, so delighted she had enough friends to invite, that he had allowed himself the cautious hope that perhaps she was getting better. That she was, in some small way, happy.