Holly Lester (9 page)

‘Were you very wild?'

She shrugged. ‘Not really; it just looked that way. I had a boyfriend named Stanley Hooperton. He drove an old Harley Davidson and wore leathers – very exciting. He once tried to have it off with me on his bike and almost broke his willy in half. He was a big bloke, young Stanley, and he could look very frightening. But he was a softie, really. His dad was a dentist in Eastbourne.'

The article made much of her mother; deserted by the boozy playwright while Holly was still a tot, she'd scraped and saved – both to bring her daughter up ‘right' and, in the modern fashion, to further her own career. She had been a mother's help, a waitress, a secretary, a shop assistant and, finally, a psychiatric social worker, a fully qualified member of the helping rather than the helped.

‘What's a psychiatric social worker?'

‘Ah, you're reading about my mum. She's a psychotherapist for the state, who only does house calls.'

‘Were you an only child?'

She looked warily at him, then shook her head. ‘No. I've got a younger brother.'

‘What happened to him?'

‘He lives in America and does drugs,' said Holly without missing a beat.

Billings was surprised. ‘Golly. That would make the news.'

She looked away and nibbled a fingernail. ‘We're hoping they won't find him – or he won't find them, which he might do if his funds get low. But even if they do, we're prepared for it.'

‘
We're
prepared for it?' he asked, wondering if she were referring to Harry, since it was rare for her to use the marital ‘we'.

‘
I'm
prepared, though I've had a little help from the Thought Police.'

‘You mean your mental minders?' he asked, and they both laughed. ‘Alan again, I presume,' he added.

She shrugged. ‘And others.'

He looked again at the article. ‘It says here that you went to grammar school. Pity those have disappeared. Apparently, we're the only country in Europe that won't make room for meritocracy in its state education system.'

‘I suppose you're going to cite America as a model next.' Her voice was a little sarcastic, but also weary. ‘Let's not talk politics now. Come back to bed. I can be late for the River Café. Right now, politics bores me to death.'

Bored
her
to death? Billings found it hard not to laugh. For almost the first time in his life he was being told to lay off a topic which he himself made it a rule to avoid, though recently he had found it fascinating. His interest in newspapers, never great, was now piqued by the prospect of finding Holly in print.

Time was, he only scanned the news, diving in, depending on the paper, to find the saleroom report, reviews of new gallery shows, or Daisy Carrera fulminating against the scaffolding still standing on the Albert Memorial. Now he actually read the home news pages, watching as, in the House of Commons, the Tories clung to their single seat majority with a desperation fortified by their disastrous standing in the opinion polls. They did not have to call a General Election for another twelve months, but as the countdown began, time no longer seemed an ally; short of a war nothing could happen to improve the Conservative position in the polls. The economy was booming, crime was down; ‘feel good' factors multiplied apace. Yet from those accorded the attention of pollsters, nothing indicated anything but a stubborn determination to have a change.

Labour was almost nauseatingly buoyant, and like so many of his fellow citizens, even the instinctively Tory Billings could not feel greatly alarmed by their imminent rise to power. Like others, he felt wrapped in a warm cocoon of prosperity; any efforts to push the usual scare buttons of revived union power or runaway inflation seemed historical, almost quaint. In his memo, Trachtenberg had written perceptively about the longevity of a political party's notoriety, but he was also right to see that in Labour's case this had expired.

To Billings, the Prime Minister seemed a decent man – appearing so fatally ineffectual only because he was charged with the impossible task of leading a party fatally tired of power. And presiding over a party so split that the resolution of its philosophical divide could only take place in Opposition.

But then, who had ever excited Billings? He cast his mind back to no avail. Not Heath; there was something repulsive there, a little boy posturing in a sailor suit was the image that came to mind. Not Douglas Home – too much the grandee. Not Macmillan – too much the grandee
manqué
, an improbable grandson of a crofter. Billings remembered his own grandfather more fondly, a clerk on the Great Western Railway who liked to joke that he was close to Lord Berners because both of them lived in Farringdon.

But he was evading the necessary focus for any retrospective view of recent leaders. Early in his affair with Holly, he had protested, ‘I'm not a Thatcherite.'

She had said, ‘of course not. That's part of the problem,' which confirmed the troubling suggestion of Trachtenberg's memo that to New Labour, Lady T. was a good thing.

He could see the putative benefits of her rule, recognize the positive changes which had taken place in his absence. He knew the arguments. Who could seriously pine for the old-fashioned unions? Who could decry the prosperity that made Billings, once so conscious of his country's poor cousin status vis-à-vis the States, now see the same kind of spending power here in England? Who could fault that?

Actually, Billings could and did. Accustomed to a rich man's world in his daily business, he could see the futility of using mercantile measurements for everything. Was he supposed to be overjoyed that everybody now seemed to own a motor car? And a video? And a camcorder? And an intrusive mobile phone? Was it comforting to see the nicer parts of London now utterly devoid of normal English middle class inhabitants? (Recently he had walked through South Kensington, where a million pounds now bought a small mews house. He'd realized that, despite its financial selectness, the area, with its barred windows, parking restrictions, and High Street Ken as an avenue of t-shirt shops and shoe shops, was an infinitely less pleasant place to live than thirty years before.) So what if the young wore black and listened to pirate radio stations, or watched one of a dozen cable or satellite television channels – was this a revolution?

He supposed it was, and in his wet, gentle Tory way regretted it. His league table of leaders seemed hopelessly historical when seen through post-Thatcher lenses, and of no relevance in any effort to situate Harry Lester and New Labour. Nor could Lester be placed among his own faraway Labour predecessors, that clique of New College dons pretending economics was a science, forming improbable alliances with a bunch of Stalinist union thugs. Unsurprisingly, Harry and New Labour wanted nothing to do with their own past, but Billings was damned if he could see what future they proposed to build.

The character of Harry Lester seemed as elusive as his precise politics. From the newspapers Billings deduced a projected
persona
of someone affable, even-tempered, outwardly decent, cheerfully intelligent, and able to delegate effortlessly the completely shitty aspects of power to icier lieutenants.

From Holly herself he learned little that changed this composite view – not because she didn't talk about her husband, but because nothing she said jarred with the profile presented to the press. He could assume, from Holly's appetite for it, that her husband preferred politics to sex (no Clinton he), and knew for a fact from her conversation that Harry liked steamed vegetables, Italian white wines, and summer holidays spent at a rich friend's San Gimignano villa. But very little else, even when they avoided the personal and discussed the issues of the day. ‘Harry's worried about Ireland,' she might remark, but her explanation of her husband's concern rarely differed from that offered by a columnist in the
Spectator
. What you saw with Harry Lester, Billings was beginning to conclude, was what you got. The consistency might be appealing, but the effect was frustratingly thin.

During these weeks, he saw no one other than Holly outside the gallery, though after Billings had ducked a succession of phone calls from McBain at the gallery, he was wakened in his flat by an early morning call from his friend.

‘There's no need to avoid me, you know.'

‘I'm not.'

‘Yes you are. Even Tara says so. I'm not prying. Far be it for me to judge anybody's private life, let alone a friend's. Of course Jackie may feel differently; she's unlikely to invite the two of you round for tea. Though presumably Mrs Lester couldn't come round anyway.'

‘Pretty unlikely,' Billings admitted.

‘A strictly private affair, heh?'

‘I thought you said you weren't going to pry.'

‘Touché. I'm really ringing to offer lunch.'

‘Brilliant,' said Billings insincerely.

‘Next Thursday. Joe Allen's – we can pretend we're back in the States. One o'clock.'

‘Let me get back to you.'

‘You won't. But I'm not giving up until you do.' Billings said goodbye and hung up guiltily, but only a little. He felt even less guilt about Marla, who had taken to shoving notes through the mail flap describing Sam's deterioration. Having glimpsed her running to cross before the light changed at the Shepherd's Bush roundabout, Sam bounding along beside her on his lead, he found it easy to ignore the pained descriptions of the dog's innumerable medical conditions.

Once, too, he went with Holly to Primrose Hill
en route
to Wimpole Street. Following her into the large kitchen downstairs, he discovered her son sitting at a round table having supper in his pyjamas. Carrie the nanny was reading
The Return of the Native
while Mrs Diamond spooned mango sorbet into large bowls. She glowered at Billings; the boy, Sebastian, smiled. Despite Billings's nervous expectation that Harry would show up, or else some assistant with a diary of appointments, curious about where Billings fitted into his boss's busy schedule, the simple family scene stayed undisturbed – to Billings's disappointment.

For part of him wanted to know the public world of his lover, and part of him therefore was disappointed when his dread of seeing Harry Lester or Alan Trachtenberg (possibly even both together, God forbid) was not realized. In conversation, he found that the harder he pressed Holly to let him ‘in' – into the world of political court, where the players propelled themselves around the board like chessmen carrying knives – the less Holly would be drawn to talk. Only when he learned to restrain his curiosity, and fall back on his very recently former self (the one who wasn't even sure who Harry Lester was), did Holly open up at all.

With the exception of Trachtenberg, she hated Harry's retinue, the legion ranks of advisers, assistants, researchers, and secretaries who hovered around. Curiously, they seemed to play a much greater role in Lester's life than his official Shadow Cabinet ministers. Even his Shadow Chancellor, a failed rival for the leadership, was rarely mentioned by Holly. One evening she took him for a drive out on Westway before going to the flat, explaining that a meeting was in progress there; when they went back he found a circle of chairs in the sitting room, and many empty glasses and bottles of Evian water. A no-smoking policy seemed designed to explode the myth of the smoke-filled room, where deals were made and futures dealt with like cards; but when Holly listed the names of some of those present, Billings recognized none of them.

They were powerful but faceless men (the women among them were notable because of their rarity), intent on climbing the ladder which they spent all day and much of the night helping Harry Lester climb as well. They became known only when they screwed up badly and slipped a rung or two, or somehow fell off altogether. There was the press secretary, destined to become a household name when Labour made it to Number Ten, but for now a man whose name Billings simply could not remember. A Mancunian ran some policy unit and was often in the news, but never on television – Billings would not have recognized his name or face. Only Trachtenberg was middling famous, as if the media took one look at this collection of ponces and appointed him the receptacle of their fear and loathing.

There were celebrity associates as well, though more distant: a fat middlebrow novelist who tempered his support for Labour by supporting the restoration of hanging; a playwright, who had satirized one of Harry's 1970s predecessors in a one-man show of rhyming couplets; a tycoon who had made his money in the Middle East building hospitals in the Gulf until a corporate enemy revealed he had a Jewish mother. And others either famous or rich (many were both) who filled the middle ground, as Billings saw it, between the dire policy wonks of Harry's working life and the secret private life of the leader's lady. Perhaps not friends, these people were nonetheless social acquaintances of Holly's, described by her partly in terms of their status, partly as participants in the dinner party or Sunday lunch or charity tennis event where she saw them. He was jealous of them for their ability to see her in such places. He did not want to claim Holly Lester all for himself, or to own her, or to show her off. What he wanted most of her was more time – normal time, spent in a park (say Kew Gardens), or a restaurant (the local Indian would do), or walking on a country lane. All of the paths he took with Holly led to the bedroom; all led to a secret life conducted behind closed doors.

Until one night, when Holly's mobile rang as they lay in bed, and she answered it to learn from someone at the gym (presumably a confidante, but how much did they know?) that Terry the Runt was looking for her urgently. She dressed in a flash, panicked by the news. ‘Close the door behind you,' she said, getting ready to leave. ‘And please don't snoop around.' He looked at her sharply and she shrugged. ‘I don't mean it that way. I just meant try and not disturb anything. Alan gets very fussy.'