Holly Lester (15 page)

‘This was my idea actually. You couldn't very well sit next to me downstairs, now could you? Aren't you going to kiss me hello?'

He walked towards her and as he drew near she threw both arms around him. They kissed passionately, and she began to press against him, until he broke off. ‘But aren't you
meant
to be downstairs?' he asked.

‘Of course. But even the Queen has to go to the loo sometimes. Come on,' she said, grabbing his hand and leading him towards the sofa. ‘We haven't got much time. If we're quick about it, I'll miss the boring bits and still get back before anyone notices I've been gone.'

She began to take off both their clothes until he protested. ‘What if someone comes in? Alan's little friend? Or some security guard?'

Holly laughed. ‘Mrs Diamond couldn't make it up these stairs. And Terry the Runt's too busy watching out for hecklers to come looking for me.'

They had reached a fairly critical stage of undress, and Holly pushed him down on his back, lengthways across the sofa.

‘Seriously,' he complained, as she began to climb on top of him. She held the remote control in front of her and pushed the volume down.

‘I locked the door,' she said, then sighed as she moved her hips and moved down onto him.

He had slept with no one since last seeing her, and found himself quick to climax. ‘Sorry,' he said, looking up and brushing aside her soft black hair so he could see her expression. She was smiling, tight-lipped, with her eyes closed and now slowly shook her head as if slowly waking up. ‘Perfect timing,' she said. ‘I've got to get back so it's just as well you were quick.' She opened her eyes, and looked at him with a detached affection. ‘I guess I have to go.'

He lay back with his own eyes closed, listening as she picked up her clothes and began to put them on. He felt sleepy and sad – until suddenly a voice erupted next to him.

We know who you are!
He jumped up, to find himself between a laughing Holly on one side and the on-screen visage of her tub-thumping husband on the other. Holly was holding the remote control in her hand.

‘For
fuck's
sake,' he said, sitting down naked on the sofa. He felt more angry than relieved.

She looked greatly taken aback. ‘Sorry,' she said mildly, as if placating a neurotic. ‘That was pure serendipity.' She laughed. ‘Harry's only banging on about the Tories.'

Billings sat up. ‘You said you'd had an inspiration. About how we could see each other. Or was this it?'

She was pulling on her dress, then reaching for her heels. ‘No, I do have a plan, but it may take a little while. I have to be sure it will work before I tell you. Be patient,' she said teasingly.

The same fear of exposure he had felt on first seeing the cover of the
News of the World
on his television screen suddenly surfaced again. ‘I don't want you risking anything. Not now; the stakes are too high.'

She looked at him coyly. ‘You mean you actually want us to win? Tsk-tsk.'

‘I mean it, Holly. You must be careful.'

She smiled but kept her lips tightly sealed. Shaking her hair out, she sat down next to him on the sofa and put a hand to his forehead. ‘I must go.' She kissed him lightly on the lips.

‘When…' he began to say, then stopped.

‘‘When will I see you again?'' she sang, and they both laughed. She had a lovely light singing voice.

‘Something like that.'

‘Soon,' she said, and stood up to go. ‘I
will
ring you this time.' She nodded at the monitor. ‘You'd better get dressed yourself. I know this speech by heart, and he'll be hitting the home straight pretty soon now.' And she was gone.

He dressed quickly, then finished his drink as Harry Lester finished his speech:

 

And I say to you, in a time of present trouble the future can bring hope. When the air around you is misted and unclear, the future can bring clarity and light. With this government, no one can look today for answers. But in two weeks' time there can be the beginning of a process that will provide answers, and establish what the questions are. And I say, let the questions begin afresh, let the answers begin to emerge. Thank you, and goodnight.

 

The words themselves seemed so dreadful to Billings that he could hardly believe the applause that emerged deafeningly on the box and like a huge subterranean wave through the floor beneath him. His scepticism was soon replaced by a sense of mystified disturbance as he left the room, for he discovered that the door Holly had claimed to lock was incapable of being locked –
it had no lock at all
. What on earth was she playing at? It didn't take a post-graduate student in Freud to wonder if she wanted to be caught. But why? He had known from the beginning that he was dealing with a dangerous situation by seeing her; he hadn't realized that Holly herself was contributing to the danger.

He made his complicated way downstairs and walked down the mezzanine stairs towards the crowd slowly leaving the building. ‘He was wonderful,' gushed one woman in an expensive-looking raincoat, and her pin-striped husband harrumphed neutrally.

Billings spied the manager's office, but there was no way now that he wanted to go backstage. Any doubts about this were dispelled when he saw the sharp-suited figure of Alan Trachtenberg, talking jokingly with his assistant Nicky. Billings had felt the man's charm with Sally, had felt it, before Trachtenberg's last snide remark an hour before, with himself. He was bemused by this new mix in the man; far better that he be the icy Rasputin of Billings's preconceptions than a slippery sliding amalgam of campy charm and ruthlessness.

As he came to ground floor level, he found himself joined in the crush by Sally Kimmo. Together they moved slowly with the crowd towards the doors. ‘He was very good tonight, don't you think?' she asked.

When he nodded politely, she said, ‘A breath of fresh air. When was the last time you heard a future Prime Minister talk about the arts in a major address?'

Had Harry talked about the arts then? At what point in Billings's session with Holly? Maybe it had come earlier, when he was almost falling asleep over his Scotch.

‘And to businessmen no less,' said Sally. ‘Not that I have anything against businessmen. My husband happens to be a very successful one. But it tickles me to think what these people made of Harry's remarks – I should think most of them think the Booker Prize is for
vegetables
,' she added, pronouncing every syllable of the word. ‘You know, like those men in the North with their marrows. What they made of his mention of poetry goodness knows.'

‘He must be very confident of winning if he's talking about poetry. I suppose it would be nice to have a government that isn't completely Philistine,' Billings said. But would it? Did he really want more government intervention in the arts, wielding subsidy like a sledge hammer, trying futilely to popularize activities that were inherently of interest to only a pampered few? What had Harry Lester said? Something not obviously suited for a pin-striped audience of sceptical manufacturers.

‘Yes, it will be,' said Sally, then clutched his arm. ‘We shouldn't count our chickens, Mr Billings,' she said, and he resisted the impulse to say it was her farm. ‘But I agree, things are looking most encouraging. And I was most intrigued by what you said to Alan.' He looked at her politely and she said, ‘You know. About the Constables. What you said struck me as very savvy. Alan, after all, is really only interested in the here and now. And that applies to art too. If someone can explain the
political
advantages of carrying about heritage matters – Old Masters, old houses, you know what I mean – it could be very important.'

‘I'm sure he has very good advisers.'

They came through the doors and suddenly the pressure dissipated as the crowd dispersed outside. She turned at the top of the stairs leading down to the street and looked wide-eyed at Billings. ‘Don't be so modest, Mr Billings. I know your gallery.'

‘You do?' he asked, flummoxed by her non sequitur.

‘Of course. Holly has told me of little else. Believe me, you will have a great part to play.'

‘Part in what?' he could not help saying.

She chuckled. ‘Like me, you don't believe in counting chickens. Very well then, Mister Billings, we will wait two weeks before speaking so confidently. But then we will meet again.
I know this
. And I look forward to it.'

She shook his hand and went quickly down the stairs. He looked up and realized there was a small demonstration going on in the street below. About fifty people – all young, dressed mainly in fatigues, accompanied by a strange assortment of scraggy-looking dogs, were trying to block the traffic but were being held back by twice as many policeman. While Sally Kimmo walked down the stairs, Billings watched as a uniformed chauffeur moved from the street and brought her back to his car, a dark Mercedes, parked right in front of a small cadre of demonstrators. As she neared the car, Billings could hear, even in the noise of night-time traffic and people departing the hall, one demonstrator, stepping forward towards the limousine, shouting above the din, ‘RICH BITCH.'

Sally took no notice at all, and half a dozen policemen hustled over and blocked the man from getting any closer. As she and the chauffeur drove off, Billings took heart from Sally Kimmo's certainty that she would see him again, the first substantial indication that Holly would too, and he went off without any class resentment on his own part to the Underground and home.

The catalogue
raisonné
of Arthur Hopkins, RA, was itself a rare book. At the London Library it had been stolen or misplaced; among second-hand bookshops there were none at hand. Presumably there was a copy in the British Library, but Billings would not be able to take it home with him.

This left his own copy, which he assumed was still sitting on a bookshelf in his former Notting Hill home. Reluctantly, he rang Marla, not seen since the Sunday scare about Holly's brother. She was friendly on the phone, but a little guarded. He arranged to drop by on his way home to collect the book.

After work, where again he had sold nothing, he took the Tube to Notting Hill. Spring was in the air: girls – and they were girls, to Billings's eyes, these breezy items looking eighteen years old – wore short skirts and pretended their legs were already tanned. He found something '60s-like in the freshness of the London young, the generation after him, the style setters with their nasal studs, black uniforms, and inordinate height (children of the well-nourished) and he was relieved to find signs of the equally dated Englishness of the population around him on the Underground. Stuck, walking up the stairs at Notting Hill, behind an old man in a raincoat using his stick to slow effect, Billings moved sideways on the stairs, only to find himself behind
another
man with a stick, moving equally at snail's pace.

Marla had cut her hair, and he stared at her with surprise when she opened the door. She didn't like having her hair cut, so what was going on? She ignored his surprise and held the book on Hopkins's
oeuvre
out to him with both hands. He took it but did not turn away. ‘Aren't you going to ask me in?'

She shrugged – her assertiveness already on the wane, he thought. ‘Sure,' she said, shrugging, ‘but I've made some changes...' Her voice trailed away.

‘Changes?' he said, and walked into the house as Holly retreated. The hall was unchanged; the same pictures lined the stairway in the hall. He moved left into the sitting room and stopped in the doorway. ‘Golly,' he said, in the imitation American accent she had always found funny. She didn't laugh now, but merely looked shy. ‘Do you like it?' she said quietly.

‘Where's the tallboy?' he asked, thinking of her Bonhams purchase, not two weeks after they had landed. ‘And the mirror?' he continued, which they'd shipped at such expense from New York. ‘Not to mention the chairs,' he added rhetorically of the three Chippendales which he had contributed, taken back after fifteen years' residence in the R-As' house. There was now a large Victorian sofa with a curved mahogany end and rich red cushions the colour of fire engines. And a Planter's chair, parked next to a new circular table – it looked Regency.

‘They're all in store,' said Marla briefly.

‘Why? Are you thinking of moving?'

She shook her head. ‘Not for the time being. But those things were our pieces. These are mine.'

‘Any chance of a glass of wine?' He was intrigued by the changes. Did they signify something he should know about? He hadn't actually thought much about Marla recently, and found himself wishing a little that he had. He walked across the room to peek into the dining room. It wasn't a dining room any longer, that was for sure, since the table was gone, and the eight matching chairs. There was an architect's drawing board with a swivel chair in the corner; next to it was an easel that held an enormous sketch pad. He wondered what she was working on.

‘DON'T GO IN THERE!' Marla shouted from behind him. He turned around to find her in the kitchen doorway holding a glass of wine. ‘Please,' she said more calmly.

‘You're painting again,' he said flatly.

‘I do not want to talk about it,' she said, handing him his wine.

He sat down and Marla reluctantly joined him. ‘I won't stay long,' he said, sensing her discomfort. They talked for a while about Sam, who had woken up in the kitchen and come in to join them. Billings scratched his head and he lay at his master's feet. ‘You know,' he said, softened by the wine. ‘If you ever want to go some place where you can't take Sam, I could look after him.'

‘I'm sure there's someone else who might feel differently.'