Holly Lester (3 page)

He took a taxi after lunch to the Primrose Hill address grudgingly supplied by Tara. It was not an area he knew well and stirred only very limited associations. The home of writers, journalists, and a few successful and probably bad artists. Mildly bohemian, but lacking the rough edge of Camden town; middle class, but without the sheer affluence of neighbouring St. John's Wood.

So he was surprised when the taxi driver stopped on Regent's Park Road in front of an enormous white Regency house. He paid the driver and extricated the canvas wrapped in bubble wrap. Looking around carefully – if a handbag got his face pushed against a wall what would a package this size do? – he saw no sign of Terry the Runt or his companion. He walked towards the front door and as he started up the steps it opened and an immense black woman stood in the doorway. She wore a white cotton dress, not unlike a nurse's uniform, but it was partly covered by a vast blue blazer that accentuated the extraordinary width of her shoulders.

She looked sharply at the bubble-wrapped picture. ‘I was not expecting a delivery.'

‘Who said it's for you?' Though English, Billings had not spent fifteen years in New York for nothing. He added mildly, ‘Is this the Lesters'?'

‘It is.'

‘Then could you please tell Mrs Lester that James Billings is here with her painting?'

The door closed in his face and he resisted the temptation to ring the bell. He heard the black woman's voice, then a garbled reply. When the door swung open he saw the woman again in front of him but was surprised to find no one else nearby. Then he noticed the intercom on the wall.

‘Follow me,' the woman said curtly. He walked into the hall and followed her into the sitting room. ‘Sitting' room was right, he decided, since he was faced by a dark sea of wooden chairs, lined in a semi-circle three rows deep.

There were dozens of framed photographs on the walls, most of Harry Lester in a variety of poses with other people – James Callaghan, Michael Foot, some union leader Billings recognized from the Winter of Discontent years before, and a publican pulling a pint for a beaming Harry in his constituency up North. The only art work consisted of two framed posters: a Toulouse Lautrec, and Steinberg's famous vision of the world from New York transported to Leeds. He was very surprised; where was the flair, the stylishness he associated with Holly Lester?

‘There you are.' He turned to find Holly in the doorway, dressed smartly in a scarlet blouse, black skirt, stockings, and black pumps. She spoke quickly, almost curtly. So this was business after all. ‘Come upstairs please.' She turned around smartly and he followed her upstairs to a large room that ran across the front of the house, painted a light Wedgwood blue, ostensibly intended to duplicate the original Regency colour. The room had three sash windows, framed by Colefax and Fowler curtains he recognized from the Interior magazines Marla read. The floor was oak, and decorated with a mix of kilims and small Persian rugs.

Here there were many paintings, mainly nineteenth-century oils, including a Seago and several landscapes he could only identify as Norwich School. The taste was faultless but utterly conventional, as if someone had been given, say, £25,000 and told to do a good job on the walls. Perhaps that was exactly what had happened, if Holly made as much money as the house (and McBain) implied. No snob, Billings saw nothing wrong with this – better to buy pictures as furniture than not buy them at all – but it did leave him baffled by her purchase of the Burgess.

‘What a nice room,' he said, thinking of its contrast with the pedestrian sitting room downstairs. She seemed to read his thoughts. ‘Downstairs is Harry's room for meetings. This,' she said hesitantly, as if recognizing its staid conventions, ‘is where we entertain.' On a side table he saw two photographs in silver frames, one of the Lesters with Harold Pinter, another with John Mortimer, which suggested the kind of people they had to drinks.

‘Your pictures are good, too,' he said, picking the adjective carefully, ‘but I can't quite see where the Burgess will go.'

‘That's what I thought. But I have another idea. Come with me.'

Moving out into the hallway, they were confronted by a small boy, wearing Oshkosh dungarees. ‘Mummy, what's that?' the boy asked, pointing at the bubble wrap. Then he sucked his thumb and stared at Billings.

‘It's a picture, darling. Something mummy's just bought. This nice man is here to help mummy put it on the wall.'

A young woman with a pigtail came slowly down the stairs from an upper floor reading a paperback. She looked up languidly, as if from a deep sleep. ‘What's that?' she asked, and Holly explained again. ‘We're just going out to the park,' the woman said, and began reading her book again as she started down the stairs.

‘Let him have ice cream if he wants, Carrie,' Holly said, and the woman nodded again without lifting her head.

‘This way,' said Holly, and marched down the corridor towards the back of the house. Opening a door, she turned to him shyly, and Billings realized he was entering the master bedroom. On the far side of the room, a big brass bed lay between two windows overlooking the garden. Holly went and sat on one side of it; taking this cue, Billings carefully leant the picture against the foot of the bed and sat in a chair across from her.

Now
he
felt nervous. Looking around, to his astonishment he saw on the walls a Kitaj, an early Hockney, a Henry Moore sketch for his series of paintings of people sleeping in the Underground during the Blitz, and three lithographs by Keith Milow. In his confusion he blurted out, ‘I don't understand.'

She looked concerned. ‘Is something wrong?'

‘Sorry, I always tend to look at people's pictures first. It's not that it tells me a lot about them or anything like that; it's just my natural inclination, as a dealer.'

‘And?'

‘Well, how can I put this? Downstairs, you have a series of what you might call working photographs; in the drawing room upstairs you have very traditional paintings; and in here you have most of Twentieth-century British art represented.'

She laughed. ‘I see. Actually, it's simple. Downstairs is a working room – no frills. Upstairs is for formal entertaining – for the likes of Mr Pinter et al. And this room – this room is
mine
.'

Mine
, he noticed, not ours. He was not sure what to say next, when a shouting child's voice suddenly echoed through the room – ‘No!' He was startled, especially since he could see no child in the room. Holly laughed again, and pointed at her night side table, where Billings saw an intercom – one of those portable systems which friends of his with babies spent all their time disconnecting, reconnecting, finding batteries for.

‘I'm afraid the nanny's hopeless. Australian, but very intellectual.'

‘A contradiction in terms?'

She giggled.

‘So she's the nanny. And the woman who answered the door is the daily?'

‘The daily? Oh, you think because she's large and black and wearing white, she must be the daily.'

It was said lightly but with a point, and showed the first acerbic edge to her character. He thought for a moment. ‘Yes.' Any other answer seemed inconceivable.

She giggled again. ‘At least you're honest. If not very PC.'

‘I left New York partly to get away from Political Correctness. Only to find it gaining ground fast over here.'

‘Is that troubling? Are you racist?' Again, there was a hint of steel.

‘Not in the slightest.'

‘Anti-Semitic then?'

‘Less than many of my middle class contemporaries.'

‘Public school contemporaries?'

‘I'm afraid so. No longer acceptable, I'm sure, but public school nonetheless.'

She scoffed. ‘My husband's public school. Oxbridge too?'

‘London actually. And then the Warburg.'

‘At least it wasn't the army.'

‘No, though my father retired a Brigadier. Why, are you prejudiced?' It was his turn to laugh, and then the intercom squawked again, this time unintelligibly.

‘Have you got children?' Holly asked.

He shook his head.

‘Still single then?'

‘I'm single
again
, actually. My wife and I are separated.'

She looked pleased at this news, but said ‘I'm sorry' nonetheless.

‘Who said I am?' he asked, and she giggled.

She kicked off her shoes, drew up her legs onto the bedspread, and held both ankles with her hand. They were splendid legs, he decided, wondering just what he was doing in the bedroom of the leader of the Labour party. ‘So,' she said, ‘I suppose you're back on the sexual warpath.' She looked at him with a teasing smile.

Downstairs and with the nanny, she had seemed so matter-of-fact that he had not dared to entertain any fantasies about why he was here. Now he could not help himself. ‘Actually, I don't meet many people these days. I lead a pretty quiet life.'

She smiled knowingly. ‘Surely you meet the odd female customer. I should think they'd be very keen. You're very good-looking.'

Billings knew this was an irresistible form of flattery intended to please him. It did, and he felt a warm blush start to glow in his cheeks.

‘Have I embarrassed you?' Holly asked, again teasingly. ‘I bet all the girls say that, don't they?'

He found himself suddenly unable to respond. When he had met Marla seven years before, she had been forthright about her interest in him, while he in English fashion, had dillied and dallied. If he remembered correctly, Marla had finally had to ask
him
out. But her style was what Americans would have called ‘up front'. There was none of the sexual coquetry Holly was exuding, which made him feel about twelve years old.

‘I
have
embarrassed you,' Holly declared, and swung her feet onto the floor and stood up. ‘So where should we put the Burgess?'

‘There?' asked Billings, pointing to the far wall where there was an empty space with a lonely-looking picture hook stuck in the plaster. ‘Isn't that what you had in mind?'

‘No, not there,' she said, and walked past him and opened another door. He stood up and followed, then entered possibly the largest bathroom he had ever seen. He realized after a moment that its size was in part illusion, fostered by a band of mirror on its far wall at waist height, and the presence of white tiles everywhere on the walls. The room comfortably held an enormous standing shower and a long bath spread across the wall in front of him. But what instantly struck him was a Hockney painting from his swimming pool period that hung fifteen feet – it seemed like fifty – across the room above the bath.

Holly turned and saw him staring at the picture. ‘Do you like it?' she asked, a little anxiously.

‘It's terrible,' he said, and saw her face fall. ‘No, I mean the painting's wonderful, but what's it doing
here
? The steam and moisture will kill it. Are you mad?'

‘Don't worry,' she said firmly, reaching behind him to close the bathroom door. ‘It's only in here during the day. No one uses this room then – I'm at work. The rest of the time it sits in that space on the wall you just pointed to.'

‘A sort of time share painting? Is that what you're going to do with the Burgess?'

‘Why not?' She stepped forward and opened the shower's double-width door. ‘I thought I'd put it in here. Come and have a look.'

Conscious of his shoes, he stepped gingerly up onto the shower's tiled floor. Holly closed this door behind him, making him feel awkward and absurd – two clothed adults standing in a shower. Nervously he pointed at the only wall of the cubicle that wasn't glass. ‘You mean up there?' he asked, pointing above the shower nozzle.

‘Maybe,' she said coyly. ‘I hope I'm not embarrassing you again.'

‘Me?' he asked, feeling himself blush.

‘
Moi
?' she countered. Then she grew serious. ‘I'm sorry about yesterday, and my guards. Those chaps still aren't used to me – I'm trying to keep my life as it was. And I suppose I'm not used to them yet, either.'

‘Don't worry. From their point of view, I suppose it's “better safe than sorry.”'

‘You know what I first liked about you?'

He shrugged, and was momentarily tempted to grab the handle next to them and douse them both.

‘I mean besides the way you looked. It was the fact that you didn't know who I was.'

She was smiling at him, and her eyes seemed large as – as what? he asked himself self-consciously, trying to convince himself that the wife of the Labour Party leader was doing what he thought she was doing. Large as saucers? Large as sugar beets? Then a question occurred to him. ‘How do you know I know who you are now? If you know what I mean.'

‘Maybe you don't,' she said coolly, and put a hand on his chest. He felt at once strange and strongly attracted. He was also tired of feeling twelve years old. So he leaned down (quite a way in fact as Holly was much shorter without her heels) and kissed her gently on the lips. He was unsure of the reception he would receive, and so confused by the past quarter-of-an-hour that he would have been hard pressed to predict how she would respond, but the alacrity with which she slipped her tongue between his front teeth and swirled it around in his mouth answered his doubts.

As they continued to kiss, she reached down and felt him through his trousers, though there was little need to arouse him further. He wondered what to do next? Sex in the shower usually involved hot water, lots of soap, and no clothes. He was about to move his mouth carefully but determinedly onto her cheek, to pause for breath and ask her how she wanted to proceed, when a voice echoed around the shower chamber.

He jerked away involuntarily and tried to step back. She grabbed his arms. ‘It's the intercom, idiot,' she said. ‘Ignore it.' She put her mouth up to be kissed again, when suddenly he heard a howl from the bathroom door. ‘Mummy!'