Paradise City

After twenty minutes or so, she has all the information she needs, including an email address for the chief executive’s office at Paradiso. She opens up a new Microsoft Word file. The screen fills with a blank white page, like a fresh sheet pulled tight on a hotel bed.

‘Dear Sir Howard,’ she writes in Arial 12-point. The animated paperclip pops up in the corner of the screen. ‘You look like you’re writing a letter,’ a speech bubble says. ‘Would you like some help?’ Beatrice scowls. No, she thinks, I don’t need anyone’s help. Not any more. This, I’m doing for me. She takes a deep breath, then types: ‘You won’t remember me but we met in Room 423 of the Hotel Rotunda in Mayfair.’

Howard

He’s never seen the point of opera, to be honest. All that faffing about on stage, those fat people singing declarations of love in a foreign language while everyone in the audience sits puffed up with their own pretension, fanning themselves with programmes that cost more than an hour’s wage for the Polish babysitter back in SW3. No, if he had a choice, he’d rather go to a musical. A couple of hours of Andrew Lloyd Webber with an ice cream in the interval and he’s happy as a clam. As he reminded Claudia on the way to the Royal Opera House this evening: it’s a fraction of the cost for essentially the same form of entertainment.

‘No, Howie,’ she’d said, inspecting a fleck of dirt caught in the edge of a long acrylic nail. ‘No, it’s not.’

‘It’s all singing, isn’t it?’ He knew, of course, that he was being impossible, that he didn’t fully believe what he was saying. But the temptation to wind Claudia up by playing the ill-educated buffoon was irresistible. He caught Jocelyn eyeing him in the rear-view mirror with a carefully neutral expression. Sometimes – not very often, admittedly – Howard wondered what his driver thought of it all. Jocelyn was a miner’s son from the Welsh Valleys. He would probably be horrified to learn they had spent the best part of £600 on a couple of tickets to the Royal Opera House when neither of them really cared about the art form. Because although Claudia pretended to read the programme notes, she wasn’t interested in the performance. The most important thing for her was to be seen and, preferably, photographed by one of the Society magazines. He could already imagine the caption: ‘On Monday, Lady Claudia Pink enjoyed a night at the opera. She was dressed in a discreet black-lace sheath dress by blah blah blah, accessorised with diamond drop earrings by blah blah blah, and accompanied by her husband, self-made millionaire Sir Howard Pink, CEO of the Paradiso Group.’

Self-made, my arse, Howard thinks.

Jocelyn indicates left into a side-lane, just off Bow Street and pulls up in a disabled parking bay.

‘What is it we’re seeing tonight anyway?’ Howard asks.

‘La Bohème, dear,’ Claudia replies, the ‘dear’ dropping down his back like ice.

‘What’s the story?’

‘Penniless writer falls in love with charming flower girl. They split up. Get back together. Flower girl dies of tuberculosis. Or consumption. Are they the same thing? I never know.’

Claudia takes out her compact to powder her nose, then clicks it back into place, slips it into a sequinned clutch bag and waits for Jocelyn to open the door without glancing at her husband.

‘Sounds a right laugh,’ Howard says, getting out and stepping directly into a shallow puddle which leaves a faint tidemark on the toe of his polished black shoes. He walks round and proffers his arm to Claudia. As they move along the pavement, he hears the soft silky friction of her stockings and is aroused in spite of himself. He gives her a friendly squeeze on the hand. She smiles at him, briefly, then allows the smile to slide from her face so quickly it leaves no mark on her features. He is reminded of his mother, wiping the kitchen table clear with a dishcloth, catching the crumbs in one cupped hand.

They are ushered up two flights of stairs and directed along the red-carpeted corridor towards the Royal Box. Howard likes to sit here despite the fact that the view is obscured. He gets off on the thought that he is sitting in the same place as the Queen, even though the gilded chair with rococo swirls where Her Majesty actually takes her seat for a performance remains roped off in the corner.

You can always get close, Howard thinks as a member of staff takes his coat and gives him a glass of champagne in one swift motion, but never close enough.

He and Claudia have invited three business associates and their partners to join them this evening. It’s a good way, he finds, of getting people on-side. A night at the opera still carries a certain je ne sais quoi, especially for the Yanks.

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