Elizabeth Day - Paradise City

She has only just set up a Twitter account and is baffled by what to do with it. Reducing the entire day’s news to a series of 140-character bullet points seems to her to be an exercise in pointlessness.

‘I’m taking Howard Pink to lunch,’ she tells Sanjay, buttoning up her jacket, bought from the L.K.Bennett sale two years ago and still wearing well.

‘Ooh, anywhere nice?’

‘Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester.’

‘Blimey,’ Sanjay says, sputtering on his coffee. ‘I thought that kind of wining and dining went out with the Ark. Who are they going to sack to finance it, one wonders?’ He slumps back behind his screen. ‘Well you enjoy it while you can. Some of us have real work to do,’ Sanjay adds with a meaningful twist of the mouth.

He’s joking, of course, but Esme wishes he didn’t always make her feel like such an amateur. Walking out into the atrium, she takes out her BlackBerry and logs on to Twitter. ‘Off 2 lunch,’ she types with her thumbs. 129 characters remaining. She chews her lip. ‘Meeting Sir Howard Pink.’ 104. ‘Hoping to persuade him to give me Fash Attack discount card!’ She hates exclamation marks as a rule but Twitter seems to require this kind of enthusiastic repartee. She still has 44 characters left and supposes she should add in some smiley-faced emoticon or semi-ironic hash-tag but she can’t be bothered. She presses down with her thumb and sends the Tweet.

In truth, she wouldn’t mind a Fash Attack discount card. Sir Howard’s chain of teen clothing stores has gone from strength to strength in recent years, after ingeniously persuading top-end designers to collaborate on cheaper ranges for the mass market. The one they’d done with Dolce & Gabanna had sold out in under twelve hours. There were pieces on eBay for triple the asking price within minutes of the doors opening on High Street Ken.

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.’