Holly Lester (2 page)

Tara seemed undeterred. ‘It's not Burgess, it's the principle. How are you supposed to help lead a socialist party when you're wearing Nicole Farhi and spending six thousand pounds on art?'

‘I'm confused. Who's helping to lead a socialist party?'

Tara sighed. ‘That woman. The one who's been making gooey eyes at you three times in the last three days. Mrs Lester.'

‘Is that her name?'

‘Jesus, James. Don't you know who she is?'

‘Should I? All I know is she's rich enough to have two bodyguards threaten to break me in half.'

‘Rich enough? I'd have thought it went with the position. And as a Tory you should know who your enemy is. So tell me, who's the leader of the Labour party?'

Oh God, he thought, struggling to remember. Why couldn't he be a better citizen? Hers was the kind of question everyone should know the answer to. It didn't take an Aristotle to suggest the polity required a certain low-level commitment, of which knowing the identity of the most significant political leaders was one.

Tara saw his mind racing and began shaking her head. Desperate, he said, ‘Sam Browne.' Tara sighed, and he added rapidly, ‘No, wait a minute, he's the one who died.'

‘Well done,' she said drily.

‘And who succeeded him? The young chap, the one with the phoney smile.'

‘I'll say. And what might his name be?' she asked in the syrupy voice of a primary school teacher.

‘Lester!' he said triumphantly, sticking his index finger up in the air. ‘Larry Lester.' Tara started shaking her head again. ‘I mean
Harry
Lester,' he added.

‘Well done again,' she said sarcastically. ‘And therefore, who might the lady in question be?'

‘Ah. Mrs Harry Lester.'

‘Bingo.'

‘I have to say she didn't seem very married to me.'

‘I agree with you there. And not very PC either for a future Prime Minister's wife.'

‘Now you
are
joking.' Billings spoke with confidence. ‘Labour will never get in again.'

‘Don't count on it,' Tara said. ‘Your lot have been in far too long. People want a change. But honestly, James, I can't believe you didn't know who that woman was. Her picture's in the paper almost every day. Where
have
you been?'

New York, that's where he had been, for almost fifteen years. He had left London just after the Falklands War, feeling stymied by the unavailability of capital to start his own business. It had not been a grand establishment he had aspired to, but he had wanted independence.

Not that he found it in New York, where his knowledge of modern English painting and eighteenth-century caricatures (Gillray, Hogarth) proved most valuable under someone else's employ. He learned perforce as well the basic business of post-War modernism, at first to be able to talk to the natives at openings, then as a lucrative part of his
curriculum vitae
. Rothko, Kline, Motherwell – soon they were as much strings to his professional bow as anything done transatlantically by the Camden Town Group.

He hadn't meant to stay away so long and travelling now westwards on the Central Line towards his flat in Shepherd's Bush, he felt again how strange London seemed to him. In fifteen years he had watched New York grow ever more ghastly, ever more obviously the visible symbol of a decline which, as a foreigner, he felt no qualms about identifying in American life. And the art world had become not only ghastly but
preposterous
: four pounds of dog turds encased in lucite a
cause célèbre
of a SoHo showroom, a video of a performance artist auto-fellating – these had been the landmarks of the latest Manhattan season.

So he had been immensely relieved to come back with enough savings and a backer to buy his own place of business in the West End. He had not returned with great expectations; he had simply expected London to be much the same, a sort of Dorian Gray among cities. Instead he had found her profile even younger than when he had been young; approaching forty, he actually felt old in a city that now seemed to worship youth where in his time youth had been tolerated but no more. Returning, he had looked forward to the very sense of limits he had found so professionally frustrating fifteen years before; instead he found American-style ambition surging like an electrical storm around him. Expecting sanity, he found, in the words of a writer about New York, a neurosis in the London air which the inhabitants mistook for energy.

Leaving the Underground, he walked along Goldhawk Road until he turned down the small street of Victorian houses, now broken into flats, including his own. From the corner he saw Marla sitting and drinking a Coke on the front steps with Sam, their Labrador. For a moment he thought how beautiful she looked – like a lanky Ali McGraw, with shoulder-length dark hair. Always dressed in a loose American way, she wore jeans and trainers, a blue cardigan that covered what had once been his own Brooks Brothers shirt. As he drew near he steeled himself. Sam's left paw was bandaged; at Marla's last appearance the week before it had been the right paw. ‘Hello Marla,' he said languidly, determined to get into the house as quickly as possible.

‘Sam's hurt himself,' she said. ‘He put a thorn in his paw.'

‘You must have got the thorn out, or he wouldn't be wearing the bandage. Is he thirsty?'

‘Very,' she said and looked at him hopefully.

‘Wait here,' he said, stepping past her and turning his key in the latch. ‘I'll bring some water out.' He closed the front door firmly behind him.

He ignored his feelings of guilt, filled a small bowl of water from the kitchen tap and took it outside. Marla had decided to sulk and hung her head. He ignored her and put the bowl down in front of Sam, who showed absolutely no interest. ‘He doesn't seem too thirsty to me,' Billings said sharply. Then he took a gentler tone. ‘You can leave the bowl there when he's finished. I'll get it later.'

Back inside he poured himself a large whisky and drew the curtains. He sat down and told himself he was doing the right thing. Give her an inch and she'll take it all, he told himself; God knows in the course of their marriage he had shown tolerance. Even coming to England had been, at least partly, a final attempt to patch things up. Her terrible behaviour in New York was caused by her environs, she had argued, not by anything to do with the essential Marla. England, she had told him, would calm her down; London, last bastion of urban civility, a mild city where even Marla could not fail to be polite to people.

Dream on, he told himself. In the first two months alone they had lost the services of their milkman (greeting Marla with ‘good morning' he was told that it had been until he showed up), been banned from the newsagent (‘thank you' Mr Ali had told Marla when she'd bought a pint of milk in the absence of the departed milk man; ‘at these prices, you should say it twice' she'd replied), and alienated the neighbours on both sides of the Notting Hill mews house where Marla still lived. The last straw had come one evening in Kensington Place. When waiting for their table at the bar in front, Billings had found himself the recipient of a straight right hand, delivered after Marla had called its owner a ‘douche bag'.

Now they were separated, except that Marla seemed disinclined to accept the fact. If she'd had less money he would have felt more sorry for her. But she had kept the Notting Hill house, she had kept the furniture and pictures (the small Pasmore still caused an ache), and she had kept all the books except his core of working reference books. She had kept everything – except him, and even ‘him' she seemed unwilling to let go.

Billings finished his whisky and poured himself an extremely large glass of New Zealand sauvignon (nourishment he told himself), put on an Ella Fitzgerald tape, and was half asleep in his rented armchair when the phone rang.

It was McBain. ‘They are trying to resurrect Pop Art, you'll be happy to know, and I am determined to stop it in its tracks.'

‘Glad to hear it. I was going to ring you actually. You used to be a politics writer – tell me about Harry Lester.'

‘Good God, why?'

‘His wife came into the gallery – in fact she's come in several times. She bought a painting for six grand.' He decided not to mention her overly-protective bodyguards. There was something surreal and humiliating about the episode which made him reluctant to recount it.

‘Well, she's good for it, don't worry. The cheque won't come back.'

‘Inherited?'

‘Hardly. She's a management consultant, has her own company. Does very well, I understand – well enough to have allowed Harry to concentrate on politics since he was a mere slip of a boy.'

‘And she's interested in art?'

‘I would have thought in a trendy kind of way. Fits with the image.'

‘Image?'

‘Of the new party. You know, forget about mushy peas and “dad's down pit”; this is the swinging Labour party. Of architects and novelists and pop stars. And artists. Damien Hirst, Emma Sargeant, Leo de La Fruiti.'

‘Leo de La Fruiti?'

‘Well, you know what I mean. Any name like that, provided it isn't Alf, or Arthur, or Leonard.'

‘I see. Anything else I should know about Mrs Lester.'

‘Little is known; I'm told she likes to keep it that way. Keen on her privacy is the leader's wife. She's prettier in person than on the box, in a lightly dizzy kind of way. Not that she's meant to be dizzy – you can't run a business the size of hers without keeping a pretty good eye on the main chance. But you've seen her yourself.'

‘Happily married?'

‘I'd have thought so. No scuttlebutt to the contrary. But why? Did she act otherwise?'

‘A little bit,' said Billings, beginning, despite the visual anonymity of a telephone conversation, to blush slightly.

‘With you, huh? Golly. Don't let Marla know, or we might have the first assassination attempt on a Prime Minister's
spouse
.'

‘I wasn't saying that,' Billings protested.

‘All right. Whatever you say. But I can't believe Holly Lester plays around. There's too much at stake. And if she does I'd be pretty careful if I were you. This isn't old Labour – strong tea, Methodist prayers and working class decency. This lot play to win.'

‘Harry Lester must be the fifth leader since the Tories got in. I can't believe he'll be the first to hold power.'

‘I wouldn't count on that. Life's changed over here, my boy. It may be all on account of the Tories, but don't expect your average voter to thank them for that. They always say revolutions occur after the first change is introduced. And if there's one thing Harry Lester has made clear, it's that there won't be any going back. Old Labour's now old hat. Anyway, it's the kids' bath time – got to run. I'll come by the gallery soon.'

Billings put the phone down, none the wiser for this conversation with his best friend. They had met in New York when McBain, flush from his foreign correspondent expense account, first began buying art. Billings had managed quite easily to turn an awkward enthusiasm for poor imitations of the Hudson School into more sensible channels. Such was McBain's keenness to learn that he rapidly knew as much about the Euston Road School as Billings; soon an amateur enthusiasm became near-professional in its dedication, and began to threaten McBain's livelihood. After missing a presidential motorcade in favour of a Corot exhibition at the Met, McBain had been on the verge of being sacked by his editors, when he had decided to return to London. This was two years before, and by the time Billings came back six months later, McBain had somehow managed to re-emerge as the art columnist for London's leading (because only) evening newspaper. His column appeared under the pseudonym of Daisy Carrera – widely thought in the West End gallery and museum scene to be the name of Henri Matisse's second mistress, but in fact (as McBain had once drunkenly confessed) the name of Mrs McBain's third cousin.

The column itself was arch, acerbic, and astonishingly successful thanks to a mix of heavy learning, lightly worn, and ferocious, campaigning opinions. It read like the vitriolic outpourings of a disappointed Italian
contessa
, lightened by the camp asides of a wholly English confirmed bachelor. Of his professional persona, McBain had said, during the same drunken evening in which he had confessed his
nom de plume's
provenance, ‘It gets a little tiring at times.' As well it might, since its creator was himself a stocky, balding Scotsman, father of three small boys, and the happy husband of a Jewish American psychoanalyst who had effortlessly transferred her practice from 91st and Madison to a small room within spitting distance of the Tavistock Clinic.

But at least McBain was now writing about his passion. We all make sacrifices, Billings thought self-pityingly, just as he carried the odd hopeless abstract painting to finance his love of landscapes, watercolours in particular. Well, partly to finance it, since without his backer he would not be showing much of anything – abstract or not – in a Cork Street setting. To his shame, when he and Marla had first stopped living together two months before, his first concern had been about his backer – not perhaps altogether surprisingly, since the backer was Marla's father, a very rich insurance executive in Connecticut with a taste for English art. But Billings's mercenary anxiety proved groundless, since Marla had managed to alienate even her father as well. Calling
him
a douche bag too had placed the old boy pretty firmly on Billings's side of the marital divide.

He tried not to think any more about Marla, and found himself instead indulging in a light sexual fantasy about Mrs Harry Lester. What would she be like to sleep with? It had been seven years since he had shared bedclothes with anyone but Marla. He thought of the woman's smile and encouraging eyes; remembering
I have to have you too,
he began to think more intimate thoughts as well. But as he slipped into a light doze he heard McBain's voice in the semi-conscious background –
I can't believe Holly Lester plays around
. Neither could Billings, and as his dreams took over from his conscious thoughts, Holly Lester receded, replaced by the entirely unerotic image of Sam the Labrador.