Kitabı oku: «Paradise City»

HOWARD

He loved hotels. The warm swish of the automatic doors. The careful neutrality of the carpets, swept with the indentations of that morning’s vacuuming. The bright smile of the receptionist, the way her make-up acted both as deterrent and encouragement. He loved the apples in glass bowls, although he had eaten one once and been disappointed by its mustiness, the slight furry staleness that he can taste – even now – on the back of his tongue. He loved the furtive glances across lobby armchairs, the reassurance of anonymity, the cocoon of safety offered by the standardised semi-luxury of faux leather and freshly spritzed white orchids in pots.

He loved the illicit meetings: the flirtations between adulterous couples, the City insider imparting information, the journalist who is talking to a grey man of indistinct appearance, jotting down notes. He loved the hushed business, the suggestive smiles, the fountain pens proffered when he has to tick a box for a morning newspaper or sign for ‘any additional expenses, if you wouldn’t mind, sir’. He loved it all.

And today, now, on this particular morning, he can feel a benign calm wash over him with the first step he takes inside the Mayfair Rotunda; with the first slight pressure of the tip of his leather-soled bespoke Church’s shoes on the marbled floor, he senses it. He breathes in an air-conditioned lungful, allows his Italian leather overnight bag to be taken from him by gloved hands, and strides across the floor.

‘Nice to see you again, Sir Howard,’ says the receptionist. He squints at her name-badge. ‘Tanya’, it reads, in sans serif font above two miniature flags – one of them is Spanish; the other he can’t make out. Eastern European, he shouldn’t wonder. Probably one of the former Soviet states. They were getting everywhere these thin, ambitious girls with their black hair and sharp little faces. He wasn’t sure it was a good thing. The last time he’d rung Le Caprice for a reservation, the girl at the end of the line had asked in a thick, guttural accent how to spell his name. He’d been going there for years.

Nevertheless, he is not one to pre-judge. He admires chutzpah, in the right place. He’s fond, too, of romanticising the immigrant experience, of reminding himself that, if it weren’t for the British, his forebears would have been gassed by the Nazis. The Finks, as they were then, would have been rounded up by jack-booted monsters if they hadn’t managed to get to England in 1933. And now look at them, he wants to say. And now …

He has never been to the death camps – can’t face the idea of them, let alone the reality – but his personal history remains a matter of considerable pride. On the one and only occasion he had been asked by the BBC to take part in a current affairs discussion programme, he had supported the relaxing of border controls and received one of the biggest cheers of the night. Looking back, he wasn’t even sure why he’d said it. He voted Tory, for God’s sake.

He smiles at Tanya, dazzling her with his expensive teeth (veneers and whitening done by a dentist recommended to him by a minor Royal. He isn’t one to name names).

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re in your normal suite, Sir Howard.’

For a brief moment, he wants to weep with gratitude at this kindness, this foresight, this human generosity shown to him by a global corporation. He’s always been sentimental: easily moved to tears by charity television adverts with soulful-eyed children in hospital beds. But Tanya remembering his name has demonstrated – in a small, but significant gesture – that he is who he thinks he is; that his importance as a businessman is an acknowledged fact. He is reminded, by Tanya giving him his normal suite, by intuiting his needs, that he has made his way, that he has his own part to play in it all: in the oiling of cogs, in the handshakes that lead to the lunches that lead to the buying and selling that lead to the acquisition of influence, to the stake in governance that results in the eventual spinning of the world on its axis. He can make things work. At this, he is undoubtedly a success.

Here he is, then, Howard Pink (formerly Fink), a man with complete awareness of his status in life, confident in his opinions, blessedly certain of the rightness of his decisions. A man of fortune, yes, but also of distinction.

The financial press will insist on putting ‘self-made millionaire’ after the comma. Howard used to wear this as a badge of pride. These days, however, he can’t help but feel there is something patronising in the phrase, a sense among the blue-shirted City bigwigs that he is not quite of their sort. He has always found it magnificently ironic that men (and it is, by and large, still men) who revere money for the power it gives them dismiss the ownership of it unless it has been inherited.

Because, Howard thinks, as he turns towards the lift, isn’t it more impressive to have generated £150 million from nothing than to have been handed it on a plate by a doddery great-uncle with a baronetcy and a mouldy pile of National Trust stones? Isn’t it better, somehow, to have made one’s own way by selling clothes on an East London market stall, clothes sewn by his mother, God rest her soul, bent double over her Singer machine with pins in her mouth (he was for ever telling her not to put pins in her mouth. Did she listen? Did she bollocks), clothes that he took and marked up and pushed onto the unsuspecting hordes of Petticoat Lane Market? Wasn’t that more admirable? To have made a profit, to have ploughed it back into better stock, to have sold more, of better quality and at a higher price, and to have done this over and over again, with one canny eye always on the bottom line, until he owned Fash Attack, the fastest-growing chain of clothing shops on the British high street?

Wasn’t that worthy of some respect?

Because, after all, you only sold product by knowing first how to sell yourself.

As a young boy, Howard had once seen the Petticoat Lane crockery-seller assemble an entire place-setting, one plate on top of the other, and then throw the whole lot into the air. The trader had caught it on the way down with a giant clatter of noise and not one single plate had shattered. The housewives couldn’t open their purses quick enough after that.

That was how you shifted stuff. It was a question of performance. It was a matter of confidence.

He feels a moistness under the armpits. The collar on his shirt is too tight, even though he has spent an arm and a leg on it – forgive the pun. The shirt is made by a company called Eton. They normally sold shirts for tall, thin men but he’d insisted they custom-make them to accommodate his ever so slightly more corpulent form. Initially the name amused him – the conjunction of the country’s most famous public school with the rag-trade he knew like the back of his hand – but the joke didn’t last for long. Now, in the mornings, it depresses him to catch sight of the label.

He presses the button for the lift. Behind him, there is a squall of high-pitched laughter. He winces, then glances across. There are four people sitting in high-backed armchairs to one side of the lobby, being served silver trays of miniature scones, sandwiches and cupcakes. Two of them are older, their features bled of colour, their eyes faintly wrinkled. They look as though they are trying to enjoy themselves but would rather be at home, listening to Gardeners’ Question Time.

He guesses they are parents who have come into the city at the behest of their children to celebrate some family anniversary. Their offspring sit opposite them now – two young women, shrieking with hilarity, wearing skinny jeans and dark-coloured jackets, their hair slicked with the shine of urbanity, their lips stretched with the complacency of youth. A mobile phone, encased in pink diamanté, lies on the table in front of them. One of the girls sees him looking and stops laughing abruptly.

He thinks of her, then, as he had known he would. He thinks of the person he tries daily to forget without actually wanting to do so. He allows himself one brief flash of recall: her hair in bunches, a gap where her front tooth should have been. She is wearing a tartan dress and crushing rose petals in a mixing bowl to make what she calls perfume.

His daughter. Ada. Named after his mum.

The lift pings. He walks in, forces himself to smile at the reflection in the mirror. On the fourth floor, the doors part and he turns left down the corridor, glancing at the cardboard key holder to remind himself of the number. Room 423. A corner room.

He slips the plastic key into the slot. The door handle light winks green. He enters. His luggage is already there, on the rack by the television. The inner curtains are half-drawn, the white net giving the room a drowsy, shadowed feel. The flat-screen television is set to a personalised welcome message. Two glass bottles of mineral water stand on the capacious desk. The mirrors are all discreetly tilted and lit in a way that makes him look at least ten pounds lighter. He knows, without having to open it, that the minibar will contain a half-bottle of fine Chablis and a bar of Toblerone.

Safety, he thinks, inhaling the familiarity of the surroundings. There is a particular security, for Howard, derived only from an ease that has been painstakingly thought out by other people for his benefit. He admires the competence and does not mind paying over the odds for it. It allows him, for a few hours, to be entirely outside himself.

He removes his jacket, places it on the back of a chair, slips his BlackBerry out of the inner pocket and turns it off. He unlaces his shoes. And then, in spite of the fact that it is three in the afternoon, in spite of the fact that Tanya the receptionist would be surprised at what he is about to do, in spite of the fact that Sir Howard Pink has appointments to make, places to be, people to meet, companies to manage, emails to answer and balance sheets to read, he pads into the bathroom, turns on the tap and runs himself a deep, deep bath.

This is what he does on the first Monday of each month. A ritual, if you like.

Afterwards, smelling of generic spiced shower gel, he puts on his robe. Howard notes with displeasure that the edge of one cuff is bobbled. He can’t abide untidiness in clothes. He has been known to throw away a pair of trousers after finding a badly stitched seam or an unravelling thread. Fastidious, that’s what Claudia calls him. It was one of her words, deployed in conversation to confuse those who imagined she was little more than a silicone-enhanced trophy wife. He found her reading the dictionary sometimes in bed.

‘What are you doing that for?’ he’d ask.

‘I’m improving myself, Howie. You should do the same.’ And then she’d read out one of the definitions and get him to guess what word it belonged to.

‘“Pertaining to a gulf; full of gulfs; hence, devouring.”’

‘I dunno.’

‘“Voraginous.”’

He’d never get the right word. But that, of course, was part of Claudia’s cunning. She wasn’t clever but she knew how to jab him in the ribs, how to bring him down a peg or two when necessary. Everyone knew he’d left school at fifteen without qualifications: it was part of the Howard Pink myth. In the interviews he’d done way back when he’d opened his first flagship store in Regent Street, he’d been delighted when the journalists brought it up, had revelled in the image being created for him of a hard-working lad with gumption and guile who didn’t suffer fools gladly. He can admit now he’d been flattered by the attention, by the notion that these Oxbridge graduates from The Times and the Telegraph with their economics degrees and their flashy dictaphones were wanting to talk to him – to Howie Pink of Pink’s Garments on Petticoat Lane – and record his answers for posterity.

One of the headlines had read: ‘Howard Pink: the self-made tycoon who’s got it tailor-made.’ The accompanying photograph showed him mid-laughter, his stomach billowing out like a sail in full wind, his face scrunched up, his tongue lolling grotesquely to one side. He’d liked the idea of being a tycoon.

The picture did him no favours. Still, he thought he could live with it.

But through the years, that photo had been used again and again. Even though it was now twenty years out of date and he’d stopped giving interviews after what happened, they still used it like a taunt, a reminder of his perceived clownishness. For a while, for obvious reasons, he’d become ‘Tragic self-made millionaire Howard Pink’ and the photograph had disappeared, but now there had been a sudden resurgence.

It had popped up again last month in an in-flight magazine. He’d been flying back first-class from Munich and there it was, in full Technicolor glory, when he leafed through Airwaves: a gurning facsimile of Howard Pinkishness, used to illustrate a four-page feature on British businesses. He’d been fatter back then and had indulged in a misguided attempt to grow some facial hair. It was before he’d had his teeth done too. Suffice to say, it wasn’t his best angle.

After the in-flight magazine, he’d called Rupert, his PR man.

‘Anything you can do to stop them using that fucking thing?’ he’d asked.

‘Legally, you mean?’

‘Legally, illegally, I’m not fussy.’

There had been a quick intake of breath on the other end of the line. Rupert could never tell whether his boss was joking or not.

‘Er, well, Howard, we want to keep the media on-side, for obvious reasons, so I’d caution against doing anything too draconian—’

‘Draconian’. Another of Claudia’s words.

‘But why don’t I do a quick call-round of the newspaper editors and ask them to refrain from using it? They’ll be only too willing to play ball if it means they get more access.’

‘I don’t want to give more access, Rupe.’

Rupert tittered ‘Yes, but they don’t need to know that, do they? Leave it with me, Howard.’

Rupert had done his ring-round and, for a few weeks, the photograph had retreated from view like an unsightly child. But then, yesterday, there it was again: slap bang in the middle of a page in the Sunday Tribune, accompanying an article based on the wafer-thin scientific premise that life is kinder to optimists. The caption read: ‘Despite personal unhappiness, the self-made millionaire Sir Howard Pink has always looked on the brighter side.’

He’s sick of everyone assuming they know him. He’s sick of the caricature. He fears he’ll never be taken seriously. The BBC had never asked him back, had they? Instead, any time they needed a talking head, they got that preening old buffer with the luxuriant white hair who ran the Association of British Retail and who wouldn’t know what good sense was if it painted itself purple and jumped on his nose. Wanker.

‘They can’t disassociate you now from what happened with Ada,’ Rupert had told him once, choosing his words carefully. ‘They see the tragic backstory, not the business acumen.’

‘The tragic backstory’. Those had been his exact words.

Howard feels anger rising in his gut. He goes to the window, draws back the curtain and peers out at London’s grubby weekday glamour, looking for something to soothe his nascent agitation. A black trickle of taxicabs is beetling its way to the hotel entrance like a spreading trail of petrol. From his vantage point, Howard can make out the shiny hardness of their bonnets, the lucent yellow of each ‘For Hire’ sign reflected in the dark pool of the paintwork. Shifting his gaze along the road, he sees a young woman in high heels and a flapping mackintosh, belt knotted at the back, a copy of the Evening Standard peeking out of her handbag. She is holding a lit cigarette between two fingers and a café-chain cardboard cup of coffee in the other hand and she is walking so quickly that the coffee keeps spilling over the aperture in the plastic lid and splashing onto the checked lining of her coat. He wonders if she’ll notice soon, or if it will only be later, when she takes off her coat and is assailed by the musty smell of stale, too-sweet coffee, that she will realise. He wishes he could follow her to find out. He likes to know how a story ends.

The woman carries on walking: a brisk tick-tacking on the paving stones that echoes then fades. Up above her, a metal criss-cross of scaffolding has been erected to cover the façade of the mansion block opposite, each slotted-in pole the precise pigeon-grey of the sky beyond, each brick the damp russet colour that Howard has come to associate uniquely with his city. A builder in a hard hat and a reflective vest sends a formless shout into the street below.

Howard wishes they’d stop tampering with everything. There was so much building going on in London these days. Lumbering mechanical cranes pierced the skyline at regular intervals. Hoardings patterned with the meaningless insignia of redevelopment had cropped up everywhere. Streets were shut down, traffic diverted, bridges closed, all in the name of a frantic progress, an endless quest for more things that were shiny and new and glittering, when increasingly all Howard lusts after is the past, packaged up, preserved and honoured. Nice, historical buildings that didn’t demand attention, designed to a manageable scale so that everyone knew what they were getting.

He lets the curtain fall and then reminds himself he is not here to get annoyed by modern architecture. These monthly nights in this Mayfair hotel are meant to be his meditation space, a few hours’ holiday from himself and his memories. Only Rupert, Claudia and Tracy, his PA, know about them. Everyone else is told he’s away on business. He tells himself he must make the most of it before going back to normality tomorrow morning.

He takes slower breaths. He pushes back his shoulder blades and stretches his arms. He tries counting to ten but only gets to three before he remembers the Chablis.

Howard takes the bottle out of the minibar, unscrews the top and pours himself a healthy measure. The glass frosts up satisfyingly. Perfect temperature. A viticulturist (there are such things) once told him he shouldn’t over-refrigerate white wines. Howard repeated this to anyone he thought might be impressed and sometimes sent back cold wine at restaurants just to show he couldn’t be made a fool of. In the privacy of these four walls, however, he felt at liberty to indulge his own secret taste.

Or lack of it, as the case may be.

There is a knock on the door.

‘Housekeeping,’ comes a disembodied voice from the other side of the lustrous wood laminate.

Howard looks at the bedside clock. He is shocked to see it is already 6 p.m. and the maid is coming to do the pre-dinner turn-down. He opens the door. A black face smiles at him broadly.

‘I can come back later if you like,’ the woman says, her voice lightly accented. Howard takes in the smoothness of her skin, taught over high cheekbones, and the compactness of her diminutive frame, clad in a fitted black blouse and black trousers. She is carrying a moulded plastic basket, filled with cleaning products and mini-packets of shortbread.

‘No, no,’ he replies, loosening the belt of his robe ever so slightly. ‘Come on in.’ He holds the door with his arm so that the maid has to bend under to walk through. She giggles as she does so. Howard is encouraged.

The maid checks the tea tray and replaces a sachet of hot chocolate, then goes into the bedroom with a quick economy of movement. When Howard follows, he sees she is piling the purple and brown cushions neatly at the foot of the bed. She glances over her shoulder, catches his eye and giggles again. He laughs lightly, then takes two steps towards her. She is bending over the bed and her backside is pressing against the fabric of her trousers. Howard, who knows how these things are done, who has successfully initiated a handful of similar transactions in high-end hotels across the globe, comes up close behind her, puts his hands on either side of her waist and nudges the knot of his robe belt against the maid’s haunches.

For a second, she tenses and does not move. Then, without looking at him, the maid straightens up, letting the pillow she is holding in one hand drop onto the Egyptian cotton, 450-thread count sheets.

‘Sir … I …’

‘Shhh,’ Howard says, nuzzling her neck, smelling the sweetness of cocoa butter. He does not like to talk in these situations. Talking would make it more real.

With the maid still turned towards the bed, he unbuttons her shirt with the quick fingers bequeathed him by generations of Finks. He slips his thumb underneath the wiring of her bra, easing in his hand until it cups the maid’s right breast. He groans, in spite of himself. With his free hand, he undoes his belt, lets the robe fall open, and grips his erection. He starts slowly, rhythmically, moving up and down the shaft, all the while holding the maid’s breast, feeling the nipple turn hard underneath his touch. She is breathing more quickly now. He cannot see her face but he knows, without needing to have it confirmed, that she is smiling, that she is enjoying this, that she is loving the attention, that she is gagging for it, that she needs him to thrust against her and take her and spill his white seed across her skin … He comes with a half-suppressed sigh and a feeling of disgust. It is all over in a matter of seconds.

He is aware, even in the midst of his supposed abandon, of the need not to stain the maid’s dark trousers.

Once a tailor, always a tailor, as his mum might say. God rest her soul.