Paradise City (46 page)

‘Let’s go onto the bridge,’ she says. ‘I want to see what the view’s like from there.’

They walk up the stone stairs, trailed by a group of bare-chested Australian men who are carrying a disposable barbecue and several bottles of beer. She can smell charcoal and sweat, the faint tang of charred meat. One of the men has his face painted in blue, white and red. Their conversation is friendly and boisterous and Beatrice feels warmly towards them. Perhaps it’s the balminess of the day, or the relief of not having to explain all her secrets to Tracy, but she finds that she is no longer intimidated by strangers. She is no longer afraid that she will see the echo of her assailant on every street corner. She realises, at long last, that she feels safe. In this city, at least, she is free.

They walk up to the highest point of Putney Bridge and lean against the V-shaped dip in the wall. Tracy rests on the wall, her chin on her hands. Beatrice hangs back and stares at the water until her eyes begin to itch with the effort. She blinks, then keeps looking. The Thames unspools beneath her, a twisting plait of different currents studded through with a thousand shards of splintered light. A lone kayaker paddles upstream, the splash of his paddle leaving tiny indentations as he moves. The sun, lower now, is leaking into an orange-pink sky.

The pebble is still in her hand. Beatrice closes her fingers around it, feeling the coolness of the stone against her palm, pressing down to imprint its silhouette onto her skin. Then she lifts her arm, stretches it behind her and brings it forward in one swift motion, releasing her fist at the final moment and launching the pebble into the air. Beatrice watches it arc, then drop and she loses sight of it before it hits the water. She thinks of Susan, of her smile, of how she might never see it again. The thought doesn’t make her as sad as it should.

She imagines the pebble falling, causing a slight spray as it lands before sinking into the silty blackness.

For a few seconds after the pebble falls, the palm of her hand has a red mark, a suggestion of a shape once held.

This too, will fade.

Howard

T
he church is full. He had known it would be. People want to come to pay their respects. Or they want to come and gawp. Either way, Ada Pink’s Memorial Service at the Church of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield is extremely well attended.

It had been Penny’s suggestion to hold it here, and Howard had liked the church when he’d come to look around. From the outside, it looked like a modest patchwork of brick, set against a skyline punctuated by gleaming skyscrapers in glass and metal. But inside, the church had a high, vaulting ceiling and three balconied tiers in burnished grey stone.

‘And it’s close to where you grew up,’ Penny had said, nudging him with her shoulder.

He smiled. If he closed his eyes, he could almost hear the market traders shouting and jostling for custom. He could smell the freshly baked bagels, their dough warm and spongy in his small hand. He could listen into the stallholders plying their wares. His favourite had been the Indian-toffee man: ‘Ask your mummy for a penny, and buy some Indian toffee!’ he would cry. Howard used to watch the man casting the coloured sugar into a whirring silver bowl, twisting it deftly around a wooden stick before handing it over, grinning to expose a mouth crammed with gold teeth.

He could remember the old men with beards sitting outside Whitechapel church and the kosher restaurants, still arguing about the Russian Revolution. He can see, in his mind’s eye, a shoal of herrings being pulled from their barrels, sliced and filleted with rapid actions by the fishmongers.

He recalls the pride with which he used to fold each garment purchased from the family stall and the way he used to slip it into a brown paper bag with a satisfying crinkling sound.

He could see his mother at the end of a long day, bent over a needle and thread, sitting close to the window and holding up a seam to the light to check it was straight.

In the church, he squeezed Penny’s hand. ‘It’s perfect.’

It had been fairly easy securing the booking after that. Howard had made a substantial donation towards the restoration fund and a date had been booked for six weeks’ time. No one mentioned the fact that he was Jewish and he certainly wasn’t going to draw attention to it. Besides, Penny was Church of England through-and-through and came with a glowing reference from her local vicar in Fulham. That seemed to swing it.

Tracy had organised most of the admin: the invitations, the RSVPs, the notice that there would be no flowers, but instead donations to the Ada Pink Foundation – and Carol and Penny had done the rest. It delights him how close the two of them have become over the last six months. They had hit it off as soon as he introduced them over tea at Eden House and he had been surprised by this, by the notion that the two women he loved could find common ground instead of wanting to compete with each other. He’d said as much to Carol that evening and she glossed over it, in that way she always did, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to love him.

‘You’ll always have a special bond with her,’ Carol said. ‘Of course you will. It’s only natural.’

She snuggled up to him on the sofa and he put his arm around her, resting his cheek on the softness of her hair, and he felt, for the first time in his life, as though he didn’t have to explain anything. He was understood. Howard was amazed by this, by the sheer good fortune of it.

‘I couldn’t have got through this without you,’ he said, holding her tighter.

She looked up at him.

‘You could’ve,’ she said. ‘But you didn’t have to.’

The organ wheezes to a halt. The echo of the last line of the hymn catches in the air like a dust mote. There is the shifting sound of three hundred people resuming their seats. A few coughs, the shuffle of shoes, then Howard stands and walks briskly to the front of the church. The eulogy is in his jacket pocket. He pats it, reflexively, but doesn’t take it out. He knows exactly what he wants to say.

His footsteps sound cleanly against the worn stone. When Howard turns to face the assembled crowd, he puts his hands on either side of the wooden lectern, clutching at its edges for support. He hadn’t wanted to do this, wasn’t sure, in truth, that he’d be able to keep it together, but Penny had insisted. She said it was important to say goodbye. That perhaps he’d find speaking therapeutic. Penny had been seeing a grief counsellor and kept wanting him to go along too. Howard had refused. He didn’t need to talk to a stranger about his feelings. Not now that he has Carol.

He looks up and seeks her out. There she is: round cheeks, small chin and the big kind eyes he had noticed when he first met her. A lived-in face, made prettier by the faint etchings of lines, the spray of freckles. Carol smiles back at him, nods.

Next to her, Archie is sitting straight-backed in a suit that is too big for him. His mother, Vanessa, has tied her long dark hair up in a bun and looks graceful, like a ballerina. Archie’s leg is jiggling and he sees Vanessa reach out and rest her hand on his thigh. Archie stills himself. It is an uncomplicated gesture, the kind only a parent could make. Witnessing it, Howard feels lost.

‘I want to tell you about my daughter Ada,’ he starts. His voice is weaker than he had imagined it and his words seem to get swallowed into the reverberations of the vast, echoing building. He breathes in, slowly, then out to the count of three.

‘She was our only child.’ That was better. His throat opens, the air flows through and he finds that each word rises before him perfectly formed, ready to be spoken. ‘She wasn’t meant to die before her parents. Children never are.’

He speaks and as he speaks, he can sense the curious tingle in the atmosphere, the knowledge that everyone is listening, straining forward to catch every inflection. He speaks and he forgets why he is talking or who he is saying this for and he thinks, instead, of Ada. He speaks and his mind fills with thoughts of her, beautifully crystallised memories in a threaded-together chain. He speaks and as he speaks, the sun bleeds through the stained glass, and slips across the tiled floor of the church in slivers of red, green and yellow. Apart from his voice, there is silence.

He lets his gaze wander. He sees Penny, sitting at the front, in a pale green suit and hat, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Next to her, Carol is holding Penny’s hand, their fingers entwined. He wonders briefly if Carol is thinking of Derek, of her husband whom he has heard so much about. He wants Carol to move in with him. He wants to make her his. But he knows it’s too soon. It’s only been a few weeks since his divorce with Claudia was finalised. He doesn’t want to scare Carol off. He will wait. He will learn to be patient.

Four rows from the back, he sees Tracy, shoulders hunched in tension, her face haggard. She has been working too hard and has taken Ada’s death badly – worse than he expected. Howard is touched by this, by the fact that in spite of it all she still respects him enough to be here. They’ve been through a lot. All those years she’s worked for him, never uttering a word of disapproval, never showing what she really thinks. All those Christmas presents he’d sent her to get for Claudia at the last minute – a diamond necklace, a spa voucher, a pair of Jimmy Choo heels. And then: Room 423. The Mayfair Rotunda. The whiff of scandal. A pathetic old businessman who couldn’t keep it in his pants, even when he was meant to be marking his daughter’s disappearance. How she must have despised him. And yet, she is still here, sitting on the edge of the pew, fidgeting her order of service, trying not to cry. What would he do without Tracy? Loyal, discreet, conscientious Tracy. He must give her a pay rise.

He thinks of Beatrice Kizza. He thought he had seen her in the street earlier as he went into the church, a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye and then a receding figure walking briskly away. But he must have been mistaken. Why would she be here? Why would she accord him the respect?

Tracy seems to like her though. Says Beatrice is an excellent worker. He’s noticed her in the office, sitting at her desk, seeming more confident somehow, less apologetic. Her face has lost its sadness. She still has that dignity he’d noticed when he first met her. These days, whenever he sees her neat handwriting on Post-it notes stuck to correspondence piles, he is struck by the curved, squashed Cs, the spiky Ts, the precisely indented full-stops and commas – all of it so controlled, so careful.

He wonders if she has forgiven him. He wonders if he will ever have done enough.

But he’s changed, he wants to tell her. He wants to make her understand that he was driven by shame and grief and now he isn’t and that everything bad he has ever done in his life has stemmed from pretending to be what he isn’t, from believing, deep down, that he would never be good enough, that the pale, spotty, knock-kneed boy from Stepney would never belong.

He feels confident enough to take his hands from the lectern.

‘Ada was the one uncomplicatedly good thing I did with my life,’ he says and he leans back and looks out at the crowd, the blur of expectant faces. There are friends of Ada here from school and ballet classes. There are neighbours from the past and parents of toddlers who played with her once in the sandpit. There are men and women who knew her from university whom Howard has never met before and he is taken aback by how grown-up they seem, in their suits and skirts and their smart leather handbags. Their self-confidence strikes him almost as an affront. He can’t imagine Ada ever being like this. She never got the chance to grow out of her insecurities, never learned how to disguise them.

His business acquaintances are here too – Bradley Minchin, Rebecca Spero, Mark Steiner, the chairman of the Association of British Retail, whose hair is so magnificently bouffant it almost requires a seat of its own, and Mike, the betting CEO whose surname, Tracy tells him, is Foxall. There are, Howard is pleased to see, a smattering of MPs. The Prime Minister has sent his apologies.

Claudia is sitting slap bang in the middle of the church, at the end of a pew in a large black hat with elaborate feathers. She is perfectly groomed and her skin has a shrink-wrapped sheen. Her hair has grown a bit and seems less blonde than it used to. He wonders if she is finally allowing herself to go grey. Looking at her, Howard feels a surge of fondness. She’d barely raised an eyebrow when he brought up the subject of divorce all those months ago. Of course, that might have been the Botox.

In the end, it was relatively straightforward. There was the prenup, of course, and he’d been generous – more generous than his lawyers told him he had to be. Claudia had moved out, draped in perfumed cashmere and wishing him well.

He has read in the
Daily Mail
diary that she has been spotted out and about with a Russian oligarch called Oleg who made his millions in oil and is the subject of minor notoriety for his failed attempt last month to buy an apartment overlooking Hyde Park dubbed ‘the most expensive flat in London’. Oleg was outbid by a Qatari sheikh who snapped it up for £21 million as a gift for his fourth wife. More money than sense, thinks Howard, so obviously perfect for Claudia.

Photographs taken of the two of them at a recent polo match have been circulating in the society pages. Oleg is short and squat, with heavy brows and small fingers. At full stretch, he barely reaches Claudia’s shoulder. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what she sees in him.