The decision to divorce was mutual. He’d met Claudia by then and his affair with her had been a deliberate, doomed attempt to counteract profound unhappiness with its antidote of undemanding superficiality. His lust for Claudia had always, peculiarly, been grounded in hatred for all that she stood for. He needed her brittleness, her dead-eyed ambition, her naked desire for status and wealth, as affirmation of what he had always suspected of himself: that he was worth no more, that if you drew back the curtain there was nothing there but a small boy, threading a needle, afraid of being found out.
Shortly after they’d got married at Chelsea Register Office, Claudia had encouraged him to pack away all of Ada’s belongings. He’d been keeping his daughter’s room like a shrine and would sit there in the evenings, as if inhaling the dust could bring him closer to the air she had breathed. The air she might still be breathing, for all he knew.
Claudia had been right that it was time to move on. She was a hard woman and, for a while, Howard found himself latching gratefully on to her unsentimentality as though it were a life-raft that would bring him, at last, to the edge of the wild ocean. But it hadn’t. He’d simply grown more distant from his second wife with every box of Ada’s belongings he packed and put into storage. He’d closed off his memories and shut down his thoughts one by one. Thinking, he realised, was too dispiriting. The only time he allowed himself to dwell on his grief and indulge his unhappiness was once a month, at the Mayfair Rotunda Hotel, when his bottled-up sadness made him act in unpredictable ways, surprising even to himself.
At the age of sixty-five, he had discovered a taste for grubby sexual encounters. Sometimes, he thought, the only way to forget about love was to bury it in spadefuls of self-loathing, to make oneself ultimately unlovable, to ensure one’s soul was inviolate. It would surprise almost everyone who knew him that Howard had such thoughts.
The exercise machine beeps and the humming vibrations halt abruptly. Claudia wipes a sheen of sweat from her brow and takes a long sip of water from a bottle of Evian, eyes closed, the lashes coated with several layers of black mascara.
‘Have you remembered we’ve got this charity lunch?’ Howard asks. ‘Imelda’s elephants.’
‘Yes, Howie.’ She raises her eyebrow patronisingly. ‘Have you?’
He ignores her. ‘Jocelyn’s coming with the car at 12.30.’
‘Great. I’ll slip into something less comfortable.’ She saunters across to him and plants a light kiss on his nose. ‘You should wear that tie I bought you. The green one.’
‘All right, sweetheart,’ he says, pacified by her brief show of attentiveness. He pats her on the bottom. Her buttocks are as hard as an overcooked piece of steak. ‘See you in a bit.’
Howard wends his way slowly back upstairs, his lungs getting tighter with each step. He must cut back on the cigars, he thinks. He should take a leaf out of Claudia’s book and try to get healthy.
When he gets to the bedroom, he sees the breakfast tray has been removed, the bed neatly made. Propped up against the pillows is a small white bear, paws sewn onto a red heart embroidered with the words: ‘I love you Daddy’. It is the only thing of Ada’s he could not face packing away.
‘Where are you off to?’ Sanjay says, sitting up straighter at his keyboard so that the top half of his head is visible over the Mac screen. His eyebrows are looking especially well groomed and Esme wonders if he’s had them waxed. Automatically, she runs a finger over her own unruly brows. They are due a plucking but she just hasn’t had time this week. She’s been frantically dealing with the fall-out from the nudists piece: dozens of complaints from assorted Women’s Institutes, cider-pressing clubs, donkey sanctuaries and the Malvern Link Fire Brigade, all of whom are eager to put the record straight about the good work achieved by sales of naked charity calendars.
Online, a vociferous war of words has broken out between anonymous commenters, one of whom has called for the boycott of the newspaper: ‘Until such time as the editor of the Tribune takes down this pornographic filth and signs a pledge never to post such images again where they can be seen by children or adults of a vulnerable disposition. I, for one, will be cancelling my subscription.’
This comment alone attracted forty-three ‘Recommends’. Below it, someone calling themselves ‘Satansrib’ has added: ‘I stopped buying the paper years ago. Too many darkies in the news pages for my liking. Political correctness gone mad.’
Another calling themselves ‘Arafat2000’ has expressed their opinion that the popularity of nude charity calendars is a symptom of some obscure Zionist conspiracy involving WikiLeaks and the failed extradition of Julian Assange.
Esme sighs. She knows she is meant to embrace reader interaction, but the thought of it makes her depressed. When she first started on newspapers, it was fairly easy to ignore the green-ink obsessives: those twenty-page letters from readers detailing government attempts to assassinate them through secret radio-waves emitted from television aerials and packets of aluminium foil. Nowadays, everyone spewed forth anonymously online and the resulting bile was left for ever suspended in the ether of cyberspace. There is one man – she assumes it is a man – who keeps posting that he’s heard ‘from friends in the media that Esme Reade only got where she is today on her knees’. She’d spoken to Dave about it and he’d been unexpectedly sympathetic and told the online moderators to take it down.
‘Don’t let it get to you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to have a thicker skin.’
Which is true, of course, but she can’t help taking things like that to heart. When she told Sanjay, he’d bought her a latte. ‘If you’ve only got you this far, you’re obviously rubbish at giving head,’ he said, which made her laugh.
And then there’s all the social networking you’re meant to do. Real-life networking is bad enough: tepid white wine and exchanging business cards over the chicken satay skewers but now they’ve all got to be on Facebook and LinkedIn and editing sixty-second Instagram videos to ‘go viral’ and ‘get more page hits’.
‘You need to develop your own brand,’ the marketing department had told the Tribune newsroom during one of their god-awful ‘Multi-Platform Future’ briefings, hastily convened to introduce a dwindling group of weary old hacks to the idea of an iPad app and ‘data-blogging’.
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