Holly Lester (21 page)

‘When I grow up,' Sebastian said, then paused dramatically, presumably thinking of the multitude of careers he would have to choose from. What would he say he wanted to be? A fireman? Policeman? Software engineer? God knows what children dreamt of nowadays. ‘When I grow up,' he repeated, ‘I want to be a
convict
.'

‘Why on earth do you want to be that?'

‘Because then I'll be punished!'

‘Aren't you punished when you're bad?'

Sebastian shook his head. He was almost tearful. ‘Sometimes Carrie wants to, but Mummy never lets her. Would you punish me?'

Gladly, Billings would have thought twenty minutes earlier, but there was something so touching in Sebastian's odd confession that it wasn't merely the proximity of Mrs Diamond and Terry the Runt which dissolved any temptation to spank the bejesus out of the boy. ‘Let's go back now,' he said, and stood up. The boy took his hand and they retraced their steps to the south end of the house, where the party had descended to the rose garden and where they found Holly talking intently with Terry the Runt. She motioned furiously at Billings, and he dropped Sebastian's hand and hurried over.

‘Your dog's gone missing,' she said.

‘Sam? How'd he get out?'

She turned to Terry the Runt, who was smirking. ‘Tell him what happened,' she said sharply.

‘I just let him out for a quick sniff of air,' he protested. ‘The next thing I knew he'd scarpered.'

Billings stared at the small scratch on the end of Terry's nose. He knew the man was trained to kill with his bare hands; he knew the man was armed to the teeth. But he also knew that if Terry had hurt Sam, he would figure out some way – somewhere, somehow – to hurt him back. ‘Which way did he go?' he asked between clenched teeth.

‘That way,' said Terry, pointing behind the house towards a copse of oaks.

Sebastian was tugging at Billings's trouser leg. ‘Don't worry,' the little boy said. ‘You'll find him.'

Twenty minutes later Billings emerged from the woods at the west side of Chequers both breathless and Sam-less. To his great embarrassment Holly had enlisted the other guests in the search. The
Professore
walked carefully through a stand of trees, minding his shoes, accompanied by Sally Kimmo, each of them calling out ‘Sam' in European tones at regular intervals. At the southern boundary, the American ambassador could just be spied waving his arms and calling the dog's name. And the Prime Minister himself moved energetically about, shouting Sam's name, followed by Sebastian and Terry the Runt.

After a few more minutes' search everyone convened on the edge of the rose garden. Billings felt a strong mix of anxiety and embarrassment. ‘Please don't worry,' he announced. ‘I'll keep looking; I'm sure he'll come back soon.'

‘Has he done it before?' asked Adele Eloise.

‘Once. In Connecticut.' He remembered the occasion: Marla had insulted one of her father's neighbours, and Sam had promptly disappeared in the woods for three hours.

‘So he's an American dog?' asked Henry Eloise.

Did dogs have nationalities? ‘I never thought of him that way, but I suppose he is.'

A brief silence ensued, which was broken by the noise of splashing and a loud frightened yell. Holly looked at Harry. ‘What on earth was that?'

‘I believe it came from over there,' said Mrs Diamond, joining them from the house. She pointed at a long low building which hugged the wall at one side of the rose garden. They all turned and herded towards this structure. A puzzled Billings found himself walking next to Queenie, who hissed, ‘Annenberg.'

Annenberg? The former American ambassador? A media mogul, interested in the arts, especially when allied to technology. Hadn't he put the monster eagle on top of the embassy in Grosvenor Square? ‘You mean Ambassador Annenberg?'

She nodded, and pointed at the glass wall of the building they were approaching. ‘He gave that. During Heath's time.'

It was only now as they drew near that Billings understood that the odd structure housed a swimming pool. Through the glass side he heard more splashing from the pool, and heard a fresh yell. ‘Help! Help!' someone was shouting.

Billings ran up the steps and came to an open door, followed by Terry who was struggling to extract his pistol from a shoulder holster. Stopping short, Billings saw Alan Trachtenberg treading water in the deep end, in no obvious danger of drowning. He looked lean and fit in the water, as if he swam every day, but his body was also extraordinarily hairy – black hair not only lined his arms and legs but appeared in clumps on his back as well.

Trachtenberg slowly made his way to the side of the pool, but there Sam was waiting for him, teeth bared, tail high, barking furiously. That was the problem then: Sam wouldn't let him out of the pool. How long had this lasted? wondered Billings, hoping it had been for most of the time of Sam's disappearance. Certainly Trachtenberg was looking tired, treading water slowly and carefully breathing in and out slowly.

Trachtenberg seemed to make up his mind, for he suddenly swam urgently, kicking hard, towards the shallow end of the pool. Arriving there, he stood up in knee-deep water and started to climb out, but Sam had arrived with time to spare and stood menacingly right on the pool's edge, baring his teeth again. His sudden arrival visibly surprised Trachtenberg, who stumbled and fell over into the water.

Standing beside Billings, Sebastian giggled loudly. Billings himself was astonished, for he had never seen Sam act so aggressively, not even in his occasional park-side skirmishes with other dogs. He called out fiercely to the dog who reluctantly came round the pool towards him. Trachtenberg seized his chance and clambered out quickly at the shallow end, then ran for the changing rooms without looking back at his audience who, alarm over, seemed to find Sebastian's giggle infectious and were laughing as well. Holly came and stood next to Billings, taking hold of Sebastian's hand while Billings grabbed Sam by his collar. She wasn't laughing, but looked pensive instead. She said, ‘Every time I think you and Alan might be friends, something gets in the way.'

‘He'll get over it. No damage done, except to his pride.'

Holly shook her head. ‘The one thing he cannot stand is being laughed at. That's something he never forgives.'

She sounded so serious that Billings laughed out loud. Holly looked taken aback. He gave Sam a rough affectionate pat. ‘Sorry,' he said, ‘but you must see how funny it is. This is probably the second most powerful man in Britain. He's constantly under attack – from the Tories, from the press – about all sorts of things. He's called every name in the book; he has his motives and his honesty questioned all the time. But that's just water off a duck's back to him. Yet make him look even mildly ridiculous, and he acts like a spoiled child.' He laughed again, to Holly's obvious discomfort. ‘A leader of New Labour, laid low by a Labrador.'

‘Congratulations. I suppose,' said Tara.

‘Good luck,' said McBain. ‘You'll need it.'

‘You're not the man I married,' declared Marla, then burst into tears.

Thus his intimates greeted the announcement of Billings's appointment as the Government's new Consultant to the Arts and member of the London One Thousand Committee. Reactions of those less close to him were hard to gauge as the appointment was not front page news. It did warrant a paragraph, however, in the Home pages of
The Times
, as well as a snide reference in the
Mirror's
gossip column, which seemed to confuse him with a Cuban gallery owner on Albemarle Street with pronouncedly Pop Art tastes.

Holly had alerted him to the imminent announcement of his appointment, three days before the phone call came from Downing Street, and ten days after he had last seen her at the Annenberg pool at Chequers. ‘I've done it,' she declared over a crackling mobile line.

‘Done what?' he asked, sitting at the Cedar of Lebanon in a good humour buoyed by the sale that day of the last of his Tysons.

‘I told you I had a backup plan. And it's worked. You'll be seeing lots more of me, darling.'

How? he wondered immediately, hoping to God it wasn't another borrowed flat. The close call with Fairweather had roundly put him off that prospect. ‘How have you accomplished that? Are you making me your new butler? Or adding me to the security detail?'

‘Neither,' she said firmly, and explained his new appointment.

He was nonplussed. ‘But Holly, I can't possibly do that. I'm not a politician – and I'm not rich enough to be an arts consultant.'

‘Don't keep underselling yourself. You know much more than you think.'

‘About politics? You must be joking.'

‘No, idiot. About the arts. You may have reactionary tastes, but you are familiar with what's going on. Besides, it's a historical perspective you're meant to provide for London One Thousand.'

‘There are many people better qualified – you know that. And Trachtenberg will go spare, especially after Sam almost drowned him.'

‘Leave Alan to me. He'll do what I tell him. Or rather, what Harry tells him.'

‘But why would Harry want me on board? He barely knows me.' Thank God, thought Billings.

‘He knows we rate you. Me, and Sally, and Arnio. When we talk about the arts, he listens. Arnio says you're a deep one, and Harry took that on board. And you were a big hit with Sebastian, playing football with him like that.'

‘Oh, he has a say about appointments too?'

‘Don't be sarcastic. Of course he doesn't. But Harry was very impressed by that.'

‘How does that qualify me for a government job?'

‘Who said it did? But the fact is, Harry
hates
football. He pretends he likes it because he has to. He only likes rugger – but a Labour Prime Minister can't prefer a public school game.'

‘Kinnock liked rugby.'

‘As I said, a
Labour
Prime Minister has to be seen to love football, even if he hates it. And this way,
you'll
be around to play football with Sebastian and Harry won't have to.'

‘Jesus. I'm being given a government post so I can entertain the Prime Minister's son.'

Holly laughed. ‘Some people get much more for doing much less. Look at Harold Wilson – most of his friends got peerages just for being his friends. They didn't even entertain Mrs Wilson. You're providing a real service for your elected head of state.'

‘Thanks very much. I'll just head the ball and think of England.'

‘You'll hear from us in a couple of days. Don't even think of refusing. I'll see you next week – the first meeting's on Tuesday.'

‘Will you be there?'

‘God no. But I'll be next door. You'll be meeting above the Cabinet office. Someone will bring you through afterwards. We'll have many artistic issues of consequence to discuss, won't we?'

Between her phone call and the official one were three days in which he thought long and hard about the appointment offered him. By nature well disposed, indeed compliant if you looked hard and long at it, Billings was nonetheless enough aware of these traits in his character to kick against them when he could. Holly's assumption he would take the post therefore provoked an inevitable reaction against doing so. In time, too, which is to say on the second day after Holly's call, a counter-reaction set in, in which he saw his pique about being bossed about as itself a habitual and childish side of himself.

He was in fact at a proverbial crossroads, but there was nothing metaphorical about the choice on offer. The recent months had shown him a new world, one of currency rather than historicism, events rather than appreciation. But ‘shown' was the operative word: Billings had been a spectator, not a participant – though better to live vicariously than not to live at all. If he were to accept the government's invitation, he would now be leaving the stands for the playing field; he would now be taking part. There were no politics at stake that mattered to him; he felt no twinge of conscience about involving himself in a Labour-led initiative, didn't feel he was betraying any deeply-held convictions. What he was hesitating about was not the nature of his involvement, but the involvement itself.

But could he continue in any case in his detached role? His meetings with Holly had for the most part felt secure, and private – a proverbial island in the storm. But that had changed. The island had been hit by high winds and at least one uninvited visitor – since spying Fairweather standing outside, Billings felt anxious about even the
prospect
of meeting Holly again in their Wigmore Street hideaway. He felt like Crusoe on first encountering someone else's footprints in the sand – the idyll was over, paradise had had its first taste of poison. As much as any interest in the job, it was the sense that it was in any case too late to back out of this new world which made up Billings's mind.

The call came through three days later. This time Tara handed over the phone with a show of nonchalance. Hamish Ferguson, the press secretary, was on the line: ‘The Prime Minister would be very pleased if you would accept an appointment as a consultant to the government on the arts. You'd sit on the Committee for the London One Thousand. It's unpaid, of course, but we would like very much to have you with us.'

‘I'd be honoured,' said Billings, feeling extraordinarily craven.

‘Excellent. We'll announce it this afternoon if you have no objection. One thing,' he said and there was a pause. ‘This isn't the kind of job that requires any kind of security checks, positive vetting, or that sort of thing. And naturally we knew a bit about you before deciding to make the appointment. But if there's anything in your past – anything in your private life, really – that we should know about, I'd be very grateful if you could tell me now.'