Paradise City

She’d never been particularly good with clothes. Her mother was always going on about Esme needing to look ‘put together’.

‘A good bag and good heels will lift any outfit,’ her mother likes to say. ‘Those are the key pieces worth investing in.’

Lilian Reade considered herself something of a sartorial expert, having once enjoyed a short-lived stint as a fashion model in the 1970s after her colleagues in the Ministry of Defence had encouraged her to enter Miss Whitehall. She’d won the competition and signed up with an agency where her most high-profile job had been modelling for a knitting pattern company based in Slough. But the way she talked about it, Lilian’s glory days had been a jet-set whirlwind of catwalks, male admirers and parties in St-Tropez.

‘Girls had more meat on them in those days,’ she is fond of saying. ‘No skinny minnies. And I was naturally slender so my agency kept telling me, “Lilian,” they said, “You’ve got to try and put some weight on, dear.” I mean, can you imagine, darling, can you?’

Lilian would give a light spray of laughter while Esme would shake her head dutifully. ‘No, Mum, no I can’t.’

There is a black-and-white newspaper clipping of Lilian as Miss Whitehall in a shockingly short houndstooth dress standing outside Big Ben, posing as if her life depended on it. Lilian is prone to fishing it out from a conveniently placed scrapbook any time she wants to make her daughter feel inadequate.

Esme thinks of it now as she hops on a bus to Hyde Park Corner, wincing as the skin on the back of her ankle catches against the back of her high-heeled shoe. Her mother, needless to say, swears by high heels but the soles of Esme’s feet are already prickling with heat. She hopes she won’t have to walk too far at the other end.

But by the time she makes it to the Dorchester – which is further up Park Lane than she had remembered – she is already five minutes late. Her ankles are red-raw, her toes uncomfortably squashed. A silver-haired Frenchman greets her at the door of the restaurant, eyeing her up and down as if she is a piece of second-hand furniture, before suavely sashaying across the plush carpet, leading her past a shimmering pillar of glass that falls from the ceiling like a divine shower curtain and then on to a corner table at which Sir Howard and his PR man, Rupert, are already seated.

‘Shit,’ Esme says under her breath. Turning up late is not a good way to start the Howard Pink charm offensive.

‘Sir Howard,’ she says, with as much confidence as she can muster. ‘I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting.’ She extends her arm. Sir Howard tries to stand but only gets three-quarters of the way out of his chair before his considerable stomach makes it impossible for him to continue without toppling over. He shakes her hand. His palm is cool and surprisingly smooth. A floral scent wafts from his open-necked shirt and she recognises it instantly as Roger & Gallet soap, of the kind once used by her grandmother.

‘You’re here now, I suppose,’ Sir Howard says, unsmiling. She can sense displeasure radiating from him.

Rupert leans towards her and introduces himself. ‘Good of you to come, Esme,’ he says, as though she is doing them a tremendous favour. He is well-spoken and conventionally handsome, like one of those men in the Gillette adverts. He looks much younger than Dave even though she knows they are contemporaries. She wouldn’t imagine the two of them as friends. ‘Dave said you’re one of his star reporters,’ Rupert continues, motioning to her seat. ‘I must say, I thought you’d be older. It’s a sign of age, isn’t it, when policemen and doctors start seeming like children …’

Esme notices Sir Howard staring fixedly at a point in the mid-distance throughout Rupert’s oleaginous patter. In person, the Fash Attack millionaire looks both smaller and more imposing than his photographs would lead you to believe. His face is dominated by a bulbous nose, framed by a receding hairline that is emphasised by a copious amount of gel, employed to slick the few remaining follicular wisps severely backwards. He is not wearing a tie and the collar of his white shirt lies open to reveal a sprouting of dark chest hair. For a titan of industry, he seems remarkably unintimidating but then she spots his eyes: brown and pinprick sharp, the pupils darting this way and that, trailing the waiters, taking in the other customers, analysing everything that comes into his field of vision. He is leaning his head against one perfectly manicured hand, the tips of his fingers so close to his nose he might be smelling them. He appears almost entirely uninterested in her.

‘I’ve been at the paper for eighteen months,’ Esme is saying as a waiter unfolds her napkin and casts it out over her knees. ‘Sir Howard, it’s very kind of you to take time out of your busy schedule,’ she adds, trying to get his attention. She is not used to middle-aged men disregarding her so flagrantly.

Sir Howard turns his head, lizard-like. His voice, when he speaks, is pointedly quiet.

‘I was led to believe you were going to apologise,’ he says.

Esme flushes. ‘Oh, yes, well, of course, Sir Howard. We – I mean, the paper – are really incredibly sorry for the oversight …’

Rupert waves her apology away with a flap of the hand. ‘It’s quite all right. I’ve explained to Sir Howard that it was the picture desk who messed up. Dave tells me it won’t happen again.’

‘It won’t,’ says Esme, although she has absolutely no way of ensuring this.

‘I hate that fucking picture,’ Sir Howard says, launching the swear word across the table just as the waiter arrives bearing three identical egg-shaped bowls.

‘To start the meal, we present to you an amuse-bouche of shrimp and lobster ravioli with a ginger consommé.’

There is a slight pause.

‘Well get on with it then,’ says Howard. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

The waiter looks suitably apologetic but then takes a small age pouring the consommé into each of their dishes from individual white jugs. Once this is done, he stands back for a moment as if awaiting plaudits for the culinary genius on show. When none is forthcoming, he gives a simpering smile, bows and clasps his hands together.

‘Bon appétit,’ the waiter says, retreating backwards like a royal footman.

‘Christ,’ says Howard. ‘I thought we’d never get rid of him.’

Esme laughs. He looks at her, his eyes suddenly twinkling.

‘I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Esme.’

‘Are you Scottish?’

‘No, my Dad was.’

‘Was?’ Howard fires back.

‘Yes, he died when I was eight.’

He puts his spoon down and seems genuinely taken aback. Esme is used to all sorts of reactions when she tells strangers: shocked intakes of breath, sympathetic squeezes of the arm, patronising assurances that ‘time’s a great healer’ but, perhaps because he’s had to deal with his own loss, Howard’s appears oddly sincere.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says finally.

Rupert grimaces and wrinkles his brow, to show that he is terribly sorry too.

‘It’s all right. It was a long time ago.’

‘You never get over something like that,’ Howard says. ‘How did he die?’ he asks bluntly.

‘Drink driving.’

‘Christ. Did they catch the bastard?’

‘They didn’t need to. My father was the drunk driver.’

Howard sits motionless, a spoonful of soup hovering dangerously over the tablecloth at a midway point between bowl and mouth.

She tries not to think of her father too much but now, having mentioned his death without exactly wanting to, broken fragments of an unasked-for memory coalesce in her mind, each tiny element shooting towards a central point like a series of magnetic filings. The image is of Esme, standing at the threshold to her parents’ bedroom when she was eight years old. She is watching, frightened, as her mother kneels in front of the bed and clutches at her hair, sobbing as she grabs fistfuls and pulls at it until small piles of ash-blonde litter the sheepskin rug beneath her knees.

‘Mummy?’ she says, this child version of herself.

Her mother stops crying, the effort of it causing her to hiccough. She turns her ravaged face towards Esme and tries to smile, her lips rubbed raw of lipstick, her cheeks veined with black, and it is this – the strangeness of her half-tragic, half-comic face, the disarray of her make-up – that affects her daughter most of all, that will stick with Esme for years.

Her memories of her father are more indistinct. A strong arm, lifting her onto his shoulders. A loud expressive laugh. Terror mingled with affection in his presence. A knowledge, even at that young age, that her father was good-looking, a charmer, a man others liked to be around.

At the time of his death, her brother Robbie was too young to know what had happened. For a few years after the police knocked on their door one drizzle-dark November night, interrupting Jim’ll Fix It, Robbie kept asking her what their father was like and she would try to answer as truthfully as she could.

‘He was fun,’ she said. ‘He told good stories. He made Mummy laugh.’

But, looking back, Esme is not sure, any more, how much of what she told Robbie was her true recollection and how much of what she remembers was a story she told herself from faded photographs, a desire to make the best bits real by saying them out loud. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know if it matters.

Esme smiles brightly, breaks off a lump of bread from the warm roll on her side-plate and butters it, re-positioning the knife in a precise, straight line. She taps the knife handle three times with her index finger. The number three, she has convinced herself, has mysterious talismanic qualities that keep her safe.

Howard has finished his soup. Rupert coughs drily and conversation is temporarily suspended. In the uncomfortable semibreve of silence that follows, it is Howard who speaks first.

‘You’ve read about my daughter, I suppose?’

Esme nods. She glances anxiously at Rupert who had made it abundantly clear on the phone that she was ‘on no account whatsoever’ to mention Ada Pink’s disappearance over lunch. But of course, she has read the press cuttings, has seen the smudged newsprint image of Ada Pink’s features staring out at her from bygone front pages: the same passport photo used again and again, depicting an unsmiling, frail-looking girl with hollow cheeks, a prominent brow and hair scraped back like a ballerina.

Esme had been in her first year at university when Ada Pink disappeared and the story of her vanishing had seemed little more than a backdrop to diluted Red Bull cocktails and pyjama-themed pub crawls. But now, meeting Ada Pink’s father, she is struck by the force of his unhappiness. After all these years, she thinks, his devastation is fresh as new snow.

She fiddles with the corner of her napkin.

‘She’d be about your age by now,’ he carries on. ‘Ada. That was her name.’ A pause. ‘Or is. I’m never sure what tense to talk in.’

He gives a bark of bitter laughter, shattering the strange atmosphere that has settled around the table. She wonders whether to say something about how sorry she is but, at the same time, doesn’t want to sound bogus. She has, after all, only just met him. She’s a journalist, not a friend.

‘Well, I suggest—’ Rupert starts, but Howard interrupts him. His gaze is glittery, unfocused; his smile twisted.

‘Let’s order some plonk, shall we, Esme?’ he says, picking up the heavy bound wine list. ‘Toast absent friends.’

She nods her assent, surprised, all at once, to find she has the beginning of tears in her eyes.

Over a starter of artfully arranged radishes and crisp lettuce leaves that costs more than anyone could reasonably have anticipated, an equilibrium of sorts is established. Howard, warmed up by a full-bodied Pauillac (he had been politely conscious of the fact that the Tribune was paying), allows himself to relax. He regales Esme with riotous stories about famous people he has met, including the time he hosted Elizabeth Taylor on his private yacht and she lost one of her diamonds in the shower.

She glances across the table at Rupert, wondering if they are teasing her for sport, but he appears perfectly relaxed. He catches her looking and grins wolfishly, as if implying he’s heard every one of these anecdotes a thousand times before. Rupert really is very handsome, albeit in a rather boring way: the male equivalent of a neatly ironed shirt. But there’s something about him she can’t quite ignore, as if his very blandness poses a challenge. She wonders what he’s like in bed. Filthy, she imagines. Probably has a thing about spanking.

At the end of the meal, they order coffee. It comes in pretty china cups. Sir Howard picks out three lumpen brown sugar cubes with his fingers and drops them in his coffee, causing a small splash of liquid onto the tablecloth.

‘Well, Esme, I don’t mind saying that I wasn’t looking forward to this lunch. Thought Rupert was a bloody idiot for setting it up.’

Esme stirs in her milk. She has already realised Sir Howard is the kind of man who doesn’t want to be interrupted in full flow.

‘But I’m glad to have met you, sweetheart.’

She swallows her indignation. With men like Sir Howard, you just had to go with it. That was how you got the best contacts. Journalism taught you all sexism was relative.

He leans over and pats her hand paternally.

‘We should be going,’ Rupert says. ‘We’re already late for our 2.30.’

‘Sure, sure,’ Howard replies, pushing back his chair. ‘Rupe, can you sort out a Fash Attack discount card for this young lady?’

‘Oh, really, there’s no need,’ Esme says, without meaning it.

‘Nonsense. You’ve given me a couple of hours’ diversion in the midst of an otherwise painful day of shareholder meetings and buying concerns,’ he says jovially. ‘It’s the least I can do. Besides, it’s all part of bolstering our relations with the press.’ He wags his finger at her. ‘No more unflattering photos, eh? Are we agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

He buttons up his jacket, which sits tightly over his waistband, then leans in to kiss her on both cheeks.

‘I’m sorry about your dad,’ he murmurs softly into her ear and she wonders at first if she has heard him correctly.

‘I’m …’ Esme grapples for the right words. ‘Sorry about your daughter …’ she says stupidly. Rupert glares at her from behind his boss’s shoulder.

Howard smiles. ‘I know,’ he says sadly. ‘I know.’

The two of them walk out of the dining room. Esme sits back at the table and signals for the bill. She is perturbed, without knowing why. Something about Howard Pink has affected her. Perhaps it was the obvious resonance of a father who’d lost his daughter meeting a daughter who’d lost her father. But it was more than that too. He seemed, in spite of all the wealth he’d accumulated, in spite of the anecdotes about yachts and diamonds, to be strangely unsure of himself; to be anxious, all the time, that someone would scrape back the veneer of success and see him for who he really was.

Esme could relate to that. Most journalists – and she was no exception – did what they did to prove somebody wrong, to validate their own worth by seeing their name in the paper. She wonders if she could persuade Sir Howard to talk to her. He had never given an interview about his daughter’s disappearance but perhaps now enough time had passed. Perhaps he’d just been waiting for the right person.

She can see it now: a sit-down interview across a double-page spread. Millionaire clothing retailer speaks for the first time about his daughter’s disappearance. Headline: ‘Sir Howard’s Private Torment – “Why I can never let go.’’’ There would be a write-off on the front page. Nominations for the Press Awards. Dave would be impressed. He’d take her out for a drink to celebrate. He’d look at her tenderly, push a lock of hair behind her ear and tell her he loved her and was leaving his wife …

‘Everything was to your liking?’ The waiter’s persistent solicitousness interrupts her reverie.

‘Yes, thanks,’ says Esme, embarrassed. She punches the four digits of her pin into the card machine with unusual force and hands it back to him. Get a grip, she tells herself. Having a crush on the news editor is such a cliché. The waiter returns with her receipt, folded into a charcoal-coloured card. She slips it into her wallet, along with a thick batch of other paperwork denoting taxi rides taken and train tickets bought in the name of work. She is overdue filing her expenses, put off doing so by the thought of the laborious new computer system they’ve brought in back at the office. Sanjay is convinced they’ve only done it to make it so difficult that no one bothers.

A sluggish pall descends on her as she walks out of the restaurant, back through the lobby to the revolving doors and past the top-hatted attendants on the steps outside. Hotels are such peculiar places, she thinks, full of people not feeling entirely comfortable, either because they’re passing through on business and don’t want to be there or because they are spending a small fortune on ‘getting away from it all’ and are worried about not appreciating everything enough. She is relieved, when she gets outside, to breathe in the fresh air again, to see the tall, budded trees of Hyde Park.

On her way back to the office, she tries not to think of her father or the lost Ada Pink, staring out at her with yearning eyes. Instead, Esme takes out her BlackBerry and updates her Twitter feed. ‘Stuffed after lunch at Alain Ducasse,’ she types with a breeziness she does not feel. ‘Feet killing me!’

Carol

Carol is lying on a massage table having her shoulders pummelled by a nice girl called Stacey. The problem is she has forgotten how to relax. She used to love being pampered. Once a year, for her birthday, her daughter Vanessa would arrange a spa day in a hotel in the New Forest and the two of them would get the train down from Clapham Junction, wheeling their overnight suitcases and anticipating the fluffy robes, a haze of essential oils and glasses of iced water delicately flavoured with cucumber slices.

Whoever came up with the idea of putting cucumber in jugs of water, Carol always wondered. Or lemon, for that matter. Because you wouldn’t dream of flavouring water with banana slivers, would you? Or carrot sticks. But somehow lemon and cucumber worked.

The massage had been Vanessa’s idea.

‘Do you good, Mum,’ she said on the phone. ‘You deserve some R&R.’

Carol was sitting in the front room, staring at her slippers. She hadn’t got dressed yet, even though it was past ten in the morning.

‘R&R? What’s that when it’s at home?’

There had been a suppressed exhalation on the other end of the line.

‘Rest and relaxation, Mum.’

‘Oh. Right.’

But since Derek died, Carol has found it almost impossible to stop thinking. She’ll be drinking a cup of tea in front of Bargain Hunt and she’ll notice that all her muscles are tightly wound, her shoulders up by her ears, and instead of concentrating on the discovery of some valuable ashtray in the attic of an old-age pensioner from Basingstoke, her head will be filled with the image of a coffin and service sheets and dying flowers and she’ll realise that she hasn’t been relaxing at all. She seems to have lost the knack.

‘Relax, Mrs Hetherington,’ the therapist says but the more Stacey tells her to relax, the less she feels able to. Carol’s face is pressed through the cut-out circle on the massage table, like one of those seaside paintings where you pose for photos by peering out from underneath a frilly bathing cap or a pair of donkey ears. The hole is slightly too small to contain her features and she can feel the edges of the lavender-scented padding digging into her cheeks. She wonders if there will be marks there when she turns over. Her skin has lost its elasticity of late. She can be pottering around the supermarket, picking up things for lunch, and the side of her cheek will still be stippled with red-pink indentations from where the sheet left its mark over an hour earlier.

Stacey folds the towel neatly to one side, uncovering Carol’s leg and prompting a spray of goose-bumps to prick up along her calf. Carol is worried that her feet are ticklish and she won’t be able to stop twitching when the therapist touches them.

‘Relax,’ Stacey says. ‘Just think of something soothing.’

Carol tries to imagine faraway beaches and gently lapping waves but instead finds her mind wandering. As Stacey’s fingers knead against her calf muscles and the herby, sweet scent of the aromatherapy oil floats around the room, she wonders whether the amount you love someone dictates the nature of their death. Whether, if you loved a person – if that person made you happy and you got to enjoy life more because of them – the punishment for this is to make their death as cruel and painful as possible. A cosmic joke, she’d heard someone call it. Like karma, but inverted.

She’d never believed in God. If He existed, Carol thought, He was a right old so-and-so. All those starving children and poor people with AIDS. What kind of person would allow that?

Whereas she’s noticed that if someone hasn’t been loved at all and has brought nothing but pain and misery to those around them, they seem to slip easily into oblivion at the end of their lives with the minimum of fuss. Because there’s no one to mourn them, is there? And Carol is for ever being told – by magazines, by Sunday-morning TV shows, by well-meaning friends who bring her spiritual self-help manuals called things like The Day After Grief: Finding and Overcoming your Inner Sorrow’ – that there is a sort of dignity in mourning; that by accepting the death of a loved one, you accept your own mortality and come to a greater understanding of life. That’s the theory, anyway.

Load of old claptrap, Carol thinks.

She only poses the question because Connie’s husband Geoff has just died peacefully in his sleep of old age and a nastier, more narrow-minded little man you couldn’t imagine. Even Connie couldn’t wait to be rid of him by the end. And yet for all Geoff’s vindictive, ignorant and penny-pinching ways, he had been spared the wretchedness of a terminal illness. No incontinence nappies for him.

‘It was a blessing,’ Connie said at the funeral. It was also, Carol couldn’t help but feel, hugely unfair.

Because Derek … well, Derek was the shining love of her life, a man with whom she spent forty-odd years of married contentedness, with whom she never had to explain, only to be, a man who still made her laugh, who could make everything all right just by squeezing her shoulders and calling her ‘pet’.

Oh, he had his failings, of course he did. He snored loudly, left teaspoons on the counter, never wanted to go to the cinema because ‘it will come out soon on video’, but now that he’s gone, Carol sees these petty irritations as lovable quirks. His snoring used to keep her awake. Now she finds she can’t sleep without it.

Everyone loved Derek: the postman whose name he remembered, the shop assistant at Sainsbury’s on Garratt Lane whose grandchildren he would always ask after and the dozens of friends and colleagues he’d got to know in and around Wandsworth through the years. It wasn’t just old people either. Their grandson Archie could spend hours building model aircraft with him in the back room.

The two of them were like cuttings from the same plant. She’d catch them sometimes, heads bent over a Spitfire model in the dusky half-light of a weekend evening, and when she asked if they wanted a sandwich, they would look at her in exactly the same way – heads slightly to one side with a quizzical squint of the eyes.

‘I’ll take that as a no then,’ she would say, closing the door behind her, unable to stop herself from smiling.

Even the kids on the council estate opposite would nod at Derek in the street. She never understood how he did it, how he made friends without seeming to try. The day of the funeral, a couple of them came round and rung the bell at Lebanon Gardens while the wake was in full swing. Carol could make out the looming shadow of two hooded figures and had been afraid to open the door at first. She kept the chain on and, peering through the gap, saw two bulky teenagers standing on the front step, wearing bright yellow-and-black trainers and jeans that seemed to be falling off their waists.