Authors: Elizabeth Day
Paradise City (47 page)
But there she is sitting in the pews, looking as sculpted as ever, the contours of her face maintained to ageless perfection, and unexpectedly, he feels happy for her. He hopes she gets what she wants. He hopes she knows what that is.
He will seek her out after the service, he tells himself. He wants to be kind to her. She wasn’t a bad sort, not really.
‘Because of the way Ada died, it has been difficult to mourn her in any conventional way,’ Howard says. He feels his voice begin to wobble, each word shimmering as if caught in a cloud of intense heat. Keep it together, he tells himself. He scans the faces for reassurance and sees Keith, the family liaison officer, sitting in a group of uniformed police and plain-clothes detectives. He is so grateful to them. After eleven long years of unanswered questions and false leads and diminishing hope, they have drawn things to some sort of conclusion. Her murderer is in jail for life. Other than that, Howard tries not to think about the man who has killed his daughter. Every day, he tries anew not to give in to the rage. Carol has helped. Oddly, knowing something about Alan Clithero has had a calming effect. Why this should be, he isn’t sure. Perhaps it’s because, the way Carol tells it, Clithero was an incompetent misfit rather than a mastermind of evil. The police say that’s often the way. Still, Howard hopes he rots in hell.
‘I’ve tried to forgive,’ Howard says. ‘To be honest, I’m finding it hard.’ He blinks, refocuses. ‘But I think I’ll get there, if only because I don’t want my memories of my Ada, my sweetheart, to be poisoned by anger. He’s not worth that. And she wouldn’t have wanted it.’
There is a murmur of assent from the congregation. Somewhere at the back of the church, there is a clap. Howard looks up. And there, sitting by the door, is that journalist from the
Tribune
, the one who’d interviewed him, the one who’d lost her dad when she was little. He remembers now that she’d written him a note when the news about Ada broke and he’d been so surprised to receive it. It had been short and to-the-point but heartfelt in a way that many of the letters of condolence hadn’t. He’d been expecting her to ask him for another interview but she hadn’t and he wonders now if she chose not to, if, in fact, she thought of him as more than the tragic self-made millionaire of popular construct. If, perhaps, she saw who he really was.
What was her name? Began with an E. Scottish-sounding. He can’t remember. She is sitting next to a handsome young man with a thatch of curly hair. He looks Jewish.
She’s only gone and got herself a nice Jewish boy, Howard thinks approvingly.
He is coming to the end of what he wants to say. The light filtering through the windows has acquired a buttery sheen. The sound of the traffic outside has dimmed. Howard looks out at the faces in front of him and he wonders if he has done Ada justice. He isn’t sure he ever told her how much he loved her when she was alive, not in so many words. He wonders if she knew. Does anyone truly know how much they are loved?
He catches Carol’s eye. She is crying, he notices, and then he feels a wetness on his own cheeks.
He doesn’t wipe the tears away.
Instead, he lets them fall.
Thank you to my agents: the brilliant Nelle Andrew at PFD and Jessica Woollard, at The Marsh Agency. Thank you to Helen Garnons-Williams for her magnificent editing and her all-round loveliness and to everyone at Bloomsbury, including (but not limited to) Oliver Holden-Rea, Elizabeth Woabank, Ros Ellis and Cormac Kinsella, whose continued faith in me is a deeply cherished thing.
Thank you to Lea Beresford from Bloomsbury USA for the conversations and the kindness and the stumbling-across of restaurants in unexpected places.
Thank you to the police detective who helped me with key plot details and who, rather excitingly, didn’t want me to use his name and to Rebecca Thornton, for allowing me to ask inane questions in the name of research and for being so supportive at every stage.
Thank you to Simon Oldfield and Tim Julian for giving me the chance to stay in their beautiful place in St Ives. I can’t think of anywhere better to start a novel.
Thank you, as always, to Olivia Laing, one of my earliest readers and a writer of such shimmering brilliance I find it almost embarrassing she allows me to call her my friend.
To my family, especially my mother, Christine Day, who has been so strong and wise over the last year.
Thank you to a spectacular bunch of friends, without whom nothing would be possible, least of all getting out of bed in the morning. You know who you are. But I owe a specific debt of gratitude to Jessica Bax, Melissa Boyes, Kirrily de Polnay Jacobs, Haylie Fisher, Sadie Jones, Roya Nikkhah, Alice Patten, Emma Reed Turrell, Francesca Segal and Polly Vernon. If I believed in heart-shaped emoticons, I’d be festooning you with them now.
Lastly, to Kamal Ahmed, with immeasurable love for innumerable things, but also for showing such uncompromising belief in me – and for teaching me about 36-point headlines (nowhere near big enough, apparently).
Elizabeth Day is the author of
Scissors, Paper, Stone
, which won a Betty Trask Award, and
Home Fires
. She is an award-winning journalist who has worked for the
Evening Standard
, the
Sunday Telegraph
and the
Mail on Sunday
, and is now a feature writer for the
Observer
. She grew up in Northern Ireland, and currently lives in London.
Also available by Elizabeth Day
Home Fires
Max Weston, twenty-one, leaves for his first army posting in central Africa. What happens to him changes the lives of his family forever. At home, his parents struggle to cope. The overwhelming love Caroline has always felt for her only child is now matched by the intensity of Max’s absence. The silence is broken by the arrival of Caroline’s mother-in-law, Elsa, who at the age of ninety-eight can no longer look after herself. After years of living in fear of putting a foot wrong in front of this elegant, cuttingly courteous lady, finally, Caroline has the upper hand.
‘Elizabeth Day writes with unflinching, responsible honesty; I was inspired and enlightened by the deep humanity of
Home Fires
’
Sadie Jones
‘A beautifully written novel whose quietly discomfiting tone stays with you for a long while afterwards’
Observer
www.bloomsbury.com/ElizabethDay
Scissors, Paper, Stone
As Charles Redfern lies motionless in hospital, his wife Anne and daughter Charlotte are forced to confront their relationships with him - and with each other. Anne, once beautiful and clever, has paled in the shadow of her husband’s dominance. Charlotte, meanwhile, is battling with her own inner darkness and is desperate to prevent her relationship with her not-yet-divorced lover from disintegrating.
As the full truth of Charles’s hold over them is brought to light, both women must reconcile themselves with the choices they have made, the secrets they have kept, and the uncertain future that now lies ahead of them.
‘An absorbing and moving novel … Her writing is both delicate and direct, not an easy combination to effect, but she has pulled it off’
Elizabeth Jane Howard
‘A brave and thoughtful book … As an attempt to analyse the dysfunctional web of relationships within and outwardly normal family, it’s a courageous and sensitive story’
Independent
www.bloomsbury.com/ElizabethDay
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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2015
This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Elizabeth Day, 2015
Elizabeth Day has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-5499-0
TPB: 978-1-4088-5500-3
ePub: 978-1-4088-5501-0
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