Elizabeth Day - Paradise City

‘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.

He includes his second wife in that.

‘Claudia!’ he bellows.

One of the Filipino maids scurries towards him and whispers discreetly that Lady Pink is in the gym before scurrying off again, duster in hand. He should know their names but Claudia gets through staff so quickly he loses track. Howard, wheezing, walks all the way down to the basement where he finally finds Claudia sitting, legs akimbo, feet pressed into cable handles that are attached to tightly stretched wires emerging from a space-age piece of equipment that looks like a shaking treadmill.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

Claudia grimaces at him. Her dyed blonde hair is tied up, revealing an expressionless forehead smooth as eggshell thanks to regular injections of botulin administered by one of the most sought-after dermatologists in London.

‘Powerplate,’ she says, her voice vibrating, the tremors reminding Howard of a colleague who has just been diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s. ‘It’s good for toning up and core strength. You should try it.’

‘No thanks.’ He looks at her, taking in for a moment the slinky lines of her legs, the unnatural buoyancy of her breasts under black Lycra, and he feels nothing. He analyses this lack of sensation and is depressed by it, by the recollection of how passionate he used to be, how crazy she used to make him. The mere sight of her red-lacquered fingernails around a champagne glass stem had been enough to send him into paroxysms of sexual obsession.

He’d met her at a vulnerable time, of course. Ada had just gone missing and his marriage to Penny, his first wife, was showing the strain. You couldn’t ever recover, as a couple, from something like that, from the hopeless uncertainty of unanswered questions when your only child goes missing.

All the police could tell them was that Ada, their beautiful, edgy, neurotic nineteen-year-old daughter, had walked out of her halls of residence at Birmingham University one Friday evening in February 2001 never to be seen again. That was it: the slender filament of knowledge they’d been left with after weeks and months of fruitless searching.

There had been a thorough investigation. Even now, eleven years on, Howard gets queasy thinking about it. The questions. The interviews. The fingerprints. The murky cloud of suspicion that hovered over the parents, no matter how obvious their devastation. The constant harassment from the press: phone calls, door-knocks, carefully worded entreaties pushed through the letterbox. He’d hired private detectives – eight of them, through the years. He’d spoken, personally, to her friends, lecturers, ex-boyfriends. He’d travelled up and down the country looking for something without knowing what. He’d taken the best part of a year off work. He couldn’t sleep, was drinking too much, jumped at the sound of a door slamming.

Penny wanted him to see her therapist, said he was showing all the signs of post-traumatic stress and that he needed help. Howard ignored her. He didn’t want to get better. He wanted to pick away at the wound for the rest of his life. He felt, in a way he realised was illogical, that this was what he deserved.

No one knew anything about what had happened to Ada that night. Or if they did, they weren’t letting on. There had been rumours of drug-taking and petty crime: a patched-together picture of their daughter that neither Howard nor Penny recognised. The police found tin-foil wraps and teaspoons burned brown in Ada’s room. One night, he’d looked up heroin on the internet and the resulting information had sent him into a dark spiral of depression. It was the closest he’d come to suicide.