Holly Lester (25 page)

‘So I'll straighten you out,' said Holly. She looked at him silkily. ‘We can't have your business suffering because of the demands of your government.'

And she was able to help him a great deal, virtually from the first day she looked at his accounts. He was not taking advantage of so many provisions of the tax code, for example, that he could have paid for another assistant with his lost savings. More importantly, she gave him an analysis of sales which proved, surprisingly to him, that in time he might do very well out of watercolours – provided he could move sufficient numbers of them to offset his high fixed overhead. ‘Fixed overhead' – how he delighted in the business terminology Holly brought to his business. ‘Should I go on a course?' he asked her.

She shook her head. ‘I'll be your tutor. There's not much you really have to know in any case. It's ultimately down to taste and judgment. No one's going to teach you that. I'm just getting the fundamentals right.'

Spring turned into a warm and rainless summer. Billings took to wearing an open shirt to the gallery, carrying his cotton jacket over his shoulder. On Tuesdays he would add a tie, but the meetings in Whitehall grew shorter and shorter, while his working group with Sally Kimmo and the slow-speaking Canon Flowing filled most of the time before lunch each week.

The government sailed on buoyantly – too young for serenity, yet still untouched by any submerged rocks.

The PM's touch seemed virtually faultless and effortless, and the Opposition continued in disarray. The former Prime Minister's resignation led to an internal struggle in the Tory ranks that kept any effective opposition from forming, and Labour seemed to face no party opposition worthy of the name. Even its internal tensions seemed false ones – as Billings learned when he mentioned Chancellor White and press reports of his unhappiness to Holly. ‘They say he's unhappy?' she asked him.

‘Yes, the
Evening Standard
talks of little else.'

‘Not your friend McBain, is it?'

He shook his head. ‘He's back on the arts – what
I'd
call the straight and narrow. No, it's the political correspondent – Jeffers, or whatever his name is. And the Londoner's Diary. Is it a worry then?'

‘A worry?' Holly raised her eyebrows quizzically. ‘Lord no, it's just what we wanted.'

‘Here we go again,' said Billings, shaking his head.

‘Come again?'

‘Whenever I think something's obvious, you tell me it's not. And it usually isn't. So what is it this time? Why are you happy that the Chancellor is unhappy?'

‘I don't know if he is unhappy. I saw him two nights ago at a dinner with those dim people from Friends of the Earth and he seemed positively serene. It's what the press says that matters – and if they say he's unhappy then we're all happy.'

‘What?'

She took pity on him and explained. ‘Because he's no threat to us at all. And if the press make out that he is, there's even less room for any real threat. Got it?'

He nodded slowly. ‘All right. But can you explain why he's not any threat at all? Does Alan have something on him?'

Holly laughed, then put both hands to her head. ‘Honestly, thank God you're an arts consultant, and not something real. Have you seen the Chancellor? I mean, in the flesh?'

‘Once. At that Westminster speech of Harry's – when you and I met upstairs, remember?'

‘I remember,' she said sharply. ‘Anyhow, did anything strike you about him when you saw him?'

‘I don't know. He's no great beauty, but I didn't notice anything special about him.'

‘Yes you did – “he's no great beauty”. In fact, isn't he an ugly man?'

A nonplussed Billings said, ‘You tell me.'

‘Okay, as a woman, I will. He's repulsive. And what does that mean? In the simplest terms, it means he's unelectable. Remember Jimmy Carter?'

‘Yes. I lived in America, remember?'

She ignored him and continued. ‘Jimmy Carter was five foot nine inches tall. Today he'd never be elected President. Too short.
And
too ugly. You're always telling me politics is superficial, that it's all about appearances. Well, cheer up – I agree with you. No one under six feet tall could now be elected President of the United States – or probably Prime Minister for that matter. And nobody ugly can be elected either. You want superficial, I give you appearances only. My husband is six foot three and looks like an overgrown choir boy – he's cute, in other words. Which Neil Kinnock never was, nor Michael Foot, and certainly not the Chancellor. Suppose Harry messes up a couple of times, and we sink a little in the opinion polls – MORI gets excited over some little ‘trend'. Then you'll see all the pundits starting in about White. “He's unhappy”; “he's resentful”; “he's biding his time”; “he's the Prime Minister in waiting”; etcetera, etcetera. All crap, believe me. The Labour party used to commit collective suicide every General Election, but it doesn't any more. That's the one thing that's changed irrevocably. It will
never
put up a man with a face like...' and suddenly her voice adapted the rough Northern accent of Deputy Prime Minister Bruce, ‘a mooonkee's twat, to be our Prime Minister.'

But then, briefly, life flickered afresh in the Tory ranks. A series of stunning interventions in debate from the improbably named George Scarlatti boosted Tory morale and made Scarlatti a prime contender for his party leadership. His half-Italian blood seemed to reassure the Tories wets on Europe; his D Phil on monetarism from Chicago told those dry on Eurocurrency issues that he was one of theirs. Young, good-looking, married, a father, he suddenly seemed a very real counterblast to Labour, massive majority notwithstanding. He was good on television, and people liked him. Even Holly, inveterate avoider of political shop talk with Billings, expressed concern. ‘He's looking rather good, this Scarlatti. Harry
hates
him, which is always a worrying sign. He's good in the House, which means nothing to the country, but he might still sway enough Tories to elect him leader. Then that
would
mean something to the country.'

Billings secretly found himself rooting for Scarlatti in the race that began to develop. When Hamish Ferguson attacked the aspirant for ‘vagueness' Billings sensed Labour saw a long-term threat here – no bad thing, in Billings's view, for a government proving so ineffably smug. There seemed little immediate danger to this new regime from Scarlatti, should he be elected, but Billings found it refreshing that the government was at last worried about
something
.

He should have known better by now. Five days before the first round of the Tory poll, Billings watched Holly smirk as she put her dress back on upstairs in Downing Street and decided how best to respond to his brief query about Scarlatti's chances. Not for the first time, she announced that he should keep an eye on the national press, and expect to find a new development there.

‘Trachtenberg strikes again,' he said wearily.

She laughed outright and said, ‘Now, now. The truth will set you free.'

‘What is it this time? Scarlatti likes little boys? Or girls? Or he was a cross dresser at Caius?'

‘Don't be so cynical. There are real issues here.'

‘Of course.' He sighed, and watched Holly light a cigarette. She always collected her fag-ends and left them on her way out with the builders' stubs which littered the floor below. But how many builders smoked Dunhills? ‘You know,' he said, ‘in the art world there is also chicanery, and fraud, and straightforward careerism. But at least
nominally
they're all in the service of beauty. You can't say that about politics.'

‘Thank God for that,' she said immediately. ‘
Beauty
, for Christ's sakes, do you think it plays much of a part in most people's lives? It didn't in mine, I can tell you that, not until I was eighteen years old – if then. And
I
was a lucky one. All right, so politics is rotten, and according to you it doesn't even have the excuse of doing it all for “beauty”.' She made this sound especially poncey, and Billings was already regretting his argument. ‘But at least politics is about people,' she said scornfully. ‘That's the greater good it tries to serve – people. Nothing abstract there – nothing beautiful either, if you ask any but the most dreamy Trotskyite. But it's real.'

‘I take your point,' said Billings quietly. ‘The only problem with that is as far as I can tell, in politics no one really gives a shit about this greater good of the
people
.'

She shrugged. ‘That's a different matter altogether. At least they're
meant
to care.'

‘Like Harry? Forgive me, but I sometimes wonder if he really cares that much. When did he first get interested in politics anyway?'

She looked at him quizzically. ‘Interested? In what way?'

‘As a career. When did he first think his career could be politics?'

‘I'm not sure what you mean. He's never had any other career to speak of.' She looked at him without expression, and Billings couldn't tell if she resented his questions or simply couldn't understand why he was asking them. ‘Politics has always been his job,' she said.

‘Golly,' he said appreciatively, and Holly bit her lip and looked out the window.

Two days later the
Guardian
did its bit for George Scarlatti's campaign to lead the Conservative Party by publishing the fruits of a two week investigation into the political activities of his father Augustus, aka ‘Gus', a retired Manchester restaurateur. No, it seemed, he had not been imprisoned by the Fascists in his native Italy in 1937 as his son claimed; no, his small restaurant outside Padua had not been confiscated during the war; yes, he had been an avid follower of
Il Duce
and yes, and most damagingly, he had benefited from the misappropriation of at least two eateries owned by Jews when they had been shipped north to Germany in 1944 and never seen again. Bye bye George, thought Billings, reading Tara's copy of the paper.

In fact, Scarlatti's fate briefly hung in the balance, as a certain decent sense took hold that the sins of the fathers should not put paid to the chances of his son. But then, surprisingly, the Thatcherite wing of the party moved against Scarlatti. Despite its traditional cordial disposition towards authoritarian leaders, the right wing rump of Torydom found the nationalist attachment to Mussolini of papa Scarlatti impossible to bear. The Chairman of the 1922 Committee, a veteran MP named Alastair Trevenix, gave a newspaper interview in which this wing of the party's disavowal of the young Scarlatti was announced.

This was the last and deciding straw: Scarlatti withdrew, baffled and humiliated, and in his place two weeks later an even younger leader was elected. Simon Bruton was thirty-two years old, and apparently the voice of ‘the next generation' – he had better be, thought Billings, since none of the current generation of Tory MPs seemed to feel enthusiastic about their representation by the youth. Despite a small goatee, presumably grown to make him look older, Bruton looked even younger than his thirty two years – not surprising this, since Hamish Ferguson (so Holly told Billings) managed to start a whispering campaign that he was in fact only twenty-nine. ‘He was going to spread the rumour that Bruton was only twenty-five,' Holly told him in bed one afternoon in Downing Street. ‘But even Alan told Hamish that was going too far.'

Bruton was impossible to take seriously but was elected nonetheless on a wave of internal party apathy created in the wake of Scarlatti's withdrawal, and because of a ringing endorsement by Lady Thatcher herself. When his name was mentioned at the London One Thousand Committee by Canon Flowing, Trachtenberg and Bruce grinned simultaneously; that evening Billings watched
Newsnight
on television, which contained a pre-recorded interview with Alastair Trevenix. Staring at the man on the screen, Billings found nothing in the face to explain his feeling of familiarity. The more Trevenix said, however, in the gravelly tones of the upper class, the more Billings found himself taken back to... to what? Ah, that was it – to the warm evening in Wigmore Street, as he lay terrified of discovery, listening to Trachtenberg and Hamish Ferguson plot with Mr Pukka. Who he now realized was Alastair Trevenix, chairman of the 1922 Committee, and destroyer of George Scarlatti's chances.

Billings struggled unsuccessfully to remember what else Alastair Trevenix had said on that long-ago evening in Wigmore Street.

He didn't hear from Marla for over a month, then a note arrived saying that she was off to the States for the rest of the summer, to stay at her family's saltbox summer house near Saybrook Connecticut. It had always been a place where Marla could paint; Billings assumed this is why she was heading there. He was disappointed that she was leaving Sam in kennels, though he supposed he would have had trouble looking after him. Chequers on one occasion was one thing; Sam as a regular visitor to Number Ten would be quite another.

He wrote to Marla in Connecticut, a long chatty letter which ignored the tension between them. He explained somewhat disingenuously the activities of his new role in government, and gave long accounts of the discussions between him and Sally Kimmo about the contents of the main hall at London One Thousand. He had a postcard back, from a day trip shopping in New York City, which only barely alluded to his letters. The tone was friendly, stable, a little aloof – as if, he realized with a start, they weren't married any more.

McBain was almost equally distant, for though still in London, he wasn't much in touch with Billings, and Billings felt disinclined to pursue him. Between Trachtenberg's labelling of his friend as a political enemy, and Jackie's disapproval of himself vis à vis Marla, Billings found it more comfortable to stay away. But he missed his friend, and read Daisy Carrera's column with amusement and some discomfort, as it mixed satirical spearing of the especially silly summer exhibits of the Royal Academy with barbed commentary on the government's almost total lack of interest in the Arts. The London One Thousand plans were a particular object of ridicule, but in a general satirical way which named no names – Billings assumed that was out of deference to his own compromised role. Daisy's running assumption was that the artistic aspirations of the London One Thousand Committee would be buried under the commercial imperatives of attracting corporate sponsors. This seemed unfair to Billings, though memories of Harry Lester's worries about the
Sun
's charges of elitism stayed with him.