Paradise City (6 page)

Beatrice tried not to have too much to do with Mr Khandoker. He would turn up on her doorstep every week wearing a pale yellow salwar kameez dotted with oily stains which she assumed were from the spit and fizzle of a too-hot frying pan and she would hand over her rent money in worn £10 notes. Once, Mr Khandoker had offered to cash a cheque for her and when he returned with half the amount she had been expecting, he explained to Beatrice that of course he had to take interest and did she think he was a charity, handing out free money to worthy causes? No, he said, he was a businessman: one of Thatcher’s children.

She didn’t make that mistake again. And really, she has cause to be grateful to Mr Khandoker. He is nowhere near as bad as some of the private landlords Beatrice hears about. If she pays him on time, he leaves her alone.

She tries to remind herself of her luck but her mood remains heavy and listless. Beatrice makes herself a slice of toast under the grill, waiting for the corners of the white bread to curl with the heat. She butters the toast thickly from a tub of Flora then rips open a packet of sugar taken from the hotel and sprinkles it generously across the margarine. She bites into it, feeling the sweetness hit the back of her throat.

She wipes the crumbs from her mouth and sits on the bed to take off her clumpy flat shoes. Then, as she allows herself to do for a brief period every single night, she starts to cry. Her shoulders slump forward and she holds her head in her hands, her breath coming in gulps, tears dropping onto the bare floorboards. For five minutes, she summons all the stored-up pain and buried memory and lets the sadness wash over her. She will not let anyone else see her do this, ever. She will not allow them – the man in Room 423, the drunk on the bus, the police back home – to know her weakness. This sadness is hers alone. A precious, shielded thing.

After the tears, Beatrice feels lighter, more herself. She strips off her black clothes, hanging them carefully over the back of a wooden chair without creasing so that she can wear them again tomorrow. She is saving up to buy an iron.

As she goes through to the bathroom, she catches sight of the photograph of Susan, hanging on the wall from a crooked nail. Susan is smiling and the sun catches her hair. Her cheeks are sweating lightly – Susan always hated her cheeks and said they made her look fat but Beatrice loved them. They reminded her of plumped-up pillows. She’d taken the photograph in the café they went to on their first date, although, of course, neither of them would admit what it was until later.

In the photo, Susan is holding a glass of Coca-Cola with a straw. She always drank full fat, never Diet. Said she didn’t like the taste.

Beatrice kisses the tips of her fingers and lets her hand rest on the frame for a few moments. She has no idea whether she’ll ever see Susan again. The two of them had been split up, shortly after they’d escaped over the border to the Congo and paid a human trafficker to take them to the UK. It had cost Beatrice £21,000. She’d given the trafficker a plot of land her father owned. For the first and only time in her life, Beatrice had been grateful her father was dead and that she’d inherited a share of his fortune.

‘It’s not safe for both of you to go at the same time,’ the trafficker had said, chewing on one end of a cocktail stick. He had grubby fingernails and wore a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off. ‘One of you only. The other will follow.’

They’d had no choice. Susan squeezed Beatrice’s hand.

‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow.’

‘But . . .’

‘You’re ill. You should go first.’

Beatrice was still recovering from the effects of the police beating. Her back was pitted with sores. The cuts on her arms were not healing. The corner of one eye was still tender from a brutal punch.

If she had been stronger, more like herself, she wouldn’t have let Susan stay behind on her own. She would have thought of something to keep the two of them together. Because what was the point of any of it if they were separated? Why had they fought so hard if they were going to end up alone?

They couldn’t be together in Uganda. They’d be arrested or murdered before the year was out.

‘Devil-child’, that’s what Beatrice’s mother had called her.

Her own mother.

She’d looked her eldest daughter in the eyes and said it.

But by then, Beatrice hadn’t cared, had only had space in her head for thoughts of Susan. She’d been obsessed, crazed. And Susan . . . she had been in love with her too, of that she was sure. And yet . . . she’d never followed her to London.

They’d made a plan to meet outside Buckingham Palace, which was silly looking back, but it was the only landmark they could be sure of. On the appointed day, Susan hadn’t come. For twelve hours, Beatrice had waited in the drizzle, hugging her too-thin coat closer with every passing minute, not wanting her teeth to chatter. Her toes had grown numb, her legs ached with standing but, almost from superstition, she refused to move. She would not shift from her spot by the dour-looking statue of Queen Victoria, facing the gates and the flag, where they’d agreed they would find each other. She told herself that, if she moved, even just an inch to the left or right, Susan wouldn’t come. She made a deal with God in her mind: if I stand here, stock-still, for another hour, Susan will appear.

Beatrice waited until all the tourists had dispersed and the light had changed from rosy pink to sludge-grey and then slipped into dark blue dusk. Still no sign of her.

She’d gone back the next day and the one after that, thinking to herself that Susan must have got delayed or confused or was trying desperately to get a message to her and that she should be there, just in case, to welcome her to this strange city. She should be there, as promised, to prove her love.

But Susan never came. The drafts folder in the email account they’d set up in case either of them needed to communicate remained resolutely empty. Days, then weeks, then months and Beatrice never got word from her. Something must have gone wrong. The trafficker had gone back on his word. Her family had found her and dragged her back to Uganda against her will. Or she’d been taken by the authorities and thrown into a detention centre and it was only a matter of time until they were reunited. Surely that was it? Surely there was some sense to everything they had been through, some reason why?

Beatrice turns away from the photo. It is not good to think like this. Too many futile thoughts and she will become depressed again and when she is depressed, she cannot work, cannot so much as crawl out of bed for fear of the sky collapsing on her and the heavy grey clouds pinning her to the floor. When she gets like that, everything acquires a new, horrifying edge. The world around her sweats with an alien light. Buildings and roads and cars slough off their skins and become unfamiliar beings and Beatrice can’t leave the flat through sheer terror of what she might find on the other side of the door.

She must not let that happen. She needs the money to survive. She needs to buy an iron.

She brushes her teeth thoroughly, splashes soap and water on her face, then gets into bed. Something crinkles under her pillow and, when she slides her hand underneath, she realises it is that weekend’s paper. She’d picked it up on a bus for the TV listings. Beatrice throws it to the floor. The pages fly open and a photograph catches her eye, along the bottom of page seven.

Her gaze snaps into focus. It is the man from Room 423. He is much younger in the picture but she recognises his piggy little eyes and florid cheeks. Beatrice props the paper up on her knees to read it more closely. It is an article about optimism written by a girl called Esme Reade and the photograph caption identifies the man as ‘self-made millionaire’ Sir Howard Pink.

A millionaire, Beatrice thinks. She narrows her eyes. He should have paid her.

Howard

Howard had bought Eden House in the mid-1990s, as London property prices were rocketing skywards and when just about anyone with a 5 per cent deposit could find themselves with an interest-free mortgage and a substantial duplex in Chelsea before the day was out. Eden House was a sprawling Victorian-era mansion behind High Street Kensington, built for a painter Howard had never heard of, at a time when moneyed bohemians liked to believe they were re-creating a pastoral idyll in the heart of the city. Luther Eden had aspired to be William Morris but had never quite made it. All that was left of him was a garish oil painting full of impasto brushwork and overenthusiastic representations of hellfire, hung in an ignored corner of Tate Britain.

As a result of Eden’s arts and crafts fascination, the house was set back in a large walled garden and dotted with stone-carved representations of forest nymphs and sprightly animals every which way you looked. A goat, curled in on itself with a dazed expression, was to be found at the intersection of a piece of guttering. A charming elfish figurine, complete with a quiver of arrows, peeked out humorously from beneath the window ledge of one of the first-floor bedrooms.

Inside, the house was a mess: higgledy-piggledy staircases, winding this way and that like a drunken Escher sketch, and leading to dozens of small rooms which Howard had attempted to knock through only to be told it was structurally impossible. The saving grace was the room on the top floor, once Eden’s studio, which had double-height ceilings and windows on three sides. Howard promptly converted it into the master bedroom, insisting that a four-poster bed with purple velvet swags be placed on a specially constructed platform in the centre of the room, much to the horror of the chi-chi interior decorator he’d hired who called the idea ‘
de trop
, Sir Howard,
de trop’
.

‘Darling, I am
de trop
,’ he’d replied. ‘Hadn’t you realised that?’

It is in this cavernous bedroom that Howard now sits, watching the Formula 1 racing on a giant flat-screen television that slides in and out of a plumply upholstered stool at the foot of his king-size bed. The detritus of his breakfast lies on a tray beside him: slivers of orange flesh lining an empty glass; a white linen napkin smeared with brown sauce; a rind of bacon on a glistening china plate (today is a non-kosher day, Howard has decided). He presses a button on the wall to get someone to clear it away.

As he does so, the phone on the console table at the side of the bed starts to ring.

‘Yep,’ Howard says, picking it up, eyes still trained on the screen.

‘Good morning, Sir Howard,’ says Tracy, her voice trilling. ‘And how are we today?’

‘Fine, fine.’

‘Just to remind you, Sir Howard,’ she continues, ‘that you have a charity luncheon.’

‘Fuck.’

Tracy lets the swear word pass. After twenty-odd years, she knows him better than most people. She laughs lightly.

‘I’ve told Jocelyn to have the car ready for 12.30.’

Howard glances at his Cartier. It is already 11.45.

‘Fuck.’

‘We discussed it last week, you remember,’ Tracy says, assuming the manner of a patient nanny. ‘It’s Action for Elephants. Imelda’s charity.’

‘Elephants?’ says Howard, incredulous. ‘Why the fuck do we care about elephants?’

Tracy replies as though he’s asked something incredibly insightful. ‘It’s a pet project of hers, Sir Howard. She went on holiday to Kenya and was moved by the plight of these – hang on, let me get the wording right –’ There is a rustling of papers on the other end of the line. ‘Ah yes, that’s it, “These beautiful and noble masters of the earth”. She’s got all her family involved – you remember, the Wallis-Parkers. Descendants of the man who founded the London Stock Exchange, I believe. They’ve got a granddaughter who’s a model, always on the front of
Grazia
– you know the one, I’m sure. You’d recognise her if you saw her anyway.’

‘Christ.’

‘The point being, Sir Howard, that Imelda knows everyone worth knowing,’ Tracy concludes crisply. And then, a touch more coldly, she adds, ‘Has Claudia remembered?’

Tracy and Claudia don’t get on. Claudia thinks Tracy is patronising and dowdy – a fatal combination. Tracy believes Claudia to be little better than an ageing tart with pert breasts (fake) and pound signs in her eyes (lasered).

Howard thinks they both have a point.

‘I’ll tell her,’ Howard says.

‘Also, Rupert’s asked me to get you to call him about setting up lunch with a journalist from the
Tribune
. He said you’d know why.’

‘Thanks, Tracy.’

‘Not at all, Sir Howard.’

He puts the phone down and feels a stirring in his nether regions. There’s always been something about Tracy, with her buttoned-up manner and clipped efficiency. She’d be a challenge, Howard thinks, unlike most women. Yet he’s never been brave enough to follow this thought through, perhaps because he knows the fantasy Tracy (voraciously available once you’ve mussed up the neatly bobbed hair) is more sexually appealing than the real one. And he’s intimidated by her too, if he’s honest. Nothing like a woman’s self-evident superiority to make your cock shrivel to the size of a deflated balloon.

He groans as he levers himself out of bed and pads across to the dressing room to put on a Paisley silk robe. He goes downstairs to try and find Claudia but after a futile few minutes, peeking in and out of half-hidden sitting rooms and squeezing his cumbersome frame through narrow passageways leading nowhere, he feels his impatience rising. The house had seemed so charming when Howard bought it. He’d believed it embodied a shambolic, semi-aristocratic way of life, unlike all those dreadful new-build mansions in Essex everyone expected a man like him to buy. But, after two decades of living here, he finds himself lusting after the clean lines of a modern house with a double garage and excellent central heating. He knows now that the business of acquiring good taste, as represented by Eden House, means comfort must sometimes be sacrificed. Still, he wishes he hadn’t bought the house purely on the basis of it looking like something out of a period drama. Howard has learned, through the years, that what he thinks looks nice is almost always the wrong instinct to pursue.