‘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 Even though it was now twenty years out of date and he’d stopped giving interviews after what happened, they still used it like a taunt, a reminder of his perceived clownishness.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