‘What? As a patient?’
‘It was just a consultation. Jackie can’t take her on, of course. She’s referred her to someone else.’
Billings felt a mix of emotions he could not sort out. ‘You shouldn’t be telling me this. It’s meant to be confidential.’
McBain shrugged. ‘Listen, James. I may be a journalist, but my ethical code doesn’t come from some twat on the Press Council reprimanding me for crossing a line of taste only he can see. I makes my ethics as I finds them; all I can do is try and keep them human.’
McBain swallowed the rest of his coffee and put down his mug. ‘So yes, I suppose I shouldn’t have said a dickie bird about it, but I thought you’d want to know. I’m sure Marla’s not the easiest person in the world, but at least it looks like she’s trying to do something about it. Who knows? People do change; maybe Marla will.’
Billings had once thought the same thing. Returning to England he had tried to keep an open mind, hoping Marla could begin afresh. That was before the milkman, the grocer, the postman, the candlestick maker, the pissed-off pugilist of Kensington Place. Wearily he shook his head. ‘Of course Marla may change. And pigs might fly.’
‘And you might sleep with the wife of the future Prime Minister.’
Billings ignored this and took the mugs to the galley, with McBain following behind. Back in New York Billings had been friends for a while with a man who, thirty years before, had enjoyed a single night of passion with a movie star – had it been Julie Christie? Faye Dunaway? Billings could not remember. Virtually every time they met, this fact would emerge, usually after two or three drinks, and it would be invoked so artlessly that it seemed to be the sole distinctive accomplishment of the man. True, he was otherwise utterly unremarkable; perhaps it was his very greyness which accounted for the relentless mentions of his celebrity one-night stand. Would Billings’s own one-off rendezvous with Holly Lester grow to assume the same importance for him? God, he hoped not; he would do better to forget the whole business.
And already his meeting with her in the Wimpole Street flat was assuming the hazy status of a dream. Primrose Hill seemed real enough, but the madcap drive to doctor land, and the weird anonymity of the apartment were growing murky. He had made love to Holly Lester; he tried hard to remember the specifics, but the vivid sensations of his time in bed with her were beginning to fade, perhaps because he had unwittingly pushed that most private act to the edge of public scrutiny in the form of McBain.
He turned to McBain, ‘I told you, I doubt I’ll ever see her again.’
Tara appeared in the galley doorway behind McBain. ‘There’s someone who wants to see you.’
‘I’d better be going,’ McBain declared tactfully.
‘Do they have an appointment?’ Billings asked.
‘There’s nothing in the book.’
‘Then tell them to go away and come back another time,’ he said irritably. He grew more irritated still when Tara didn’t budge. ‘Well?’ he challenged her.
‘Since she’s wearing Lagerfeld today I thought you’d want to see her.’
‘What?’ he asked sharply.
Tara looked at Billings without emotion. ‘It’s Miz Lester,’ she said flatly. ‘Do you still want me to tell her to go away?’
McBain led the way out, and was discreet enough, as he left the gallery, not to gawk at Holly. Whoever the designer, Holly looked very smart indeed, in a charcoal suit that had sharp angled lapels and a high collar. Her skirt was fashionably short again, and her stockings were a smoky powdered grey.
She stood in front of a Lawrence Tyson abstract. Hailed in New York as the new Rothko, Tyson was to Billings’s mind an inferior mimic, who revelled in all the colours which Rothko rightly had found too unattractive to feature in his starkly beautiful colour studies. Yet Billings couldn’t complain, for in the first week alone nearly a third of the Tyson paintings had been sold. The large blotted circle of orange went for a cool twelve thousand and had been the second picture sold.
‘If you fall in love with this one too, I won’t let you buy it.’
Holly turned and flashed a large smile, and any prospective shyness between them melted away. ‘Why not?’ she asked.
‘Too expensive. It’s designed for people who can’t afford the real thing. Rothkos fetch seven figures these days, but that’s no excuse for these prices.’
‘Don’t you set them yourself?’
‘Usually. But this show was a prior commitment. Miles, who used to own the gallery, arranged it. Tyson fixed the prices. I have to hand it to him, he seems to know just what the market will bear; the man’s a virtual limited company. I just stand back and collect the cheques.’
‘I haven’t got long,’ she said suddenly, ‘and I am sorry to barge in like this. Your assistant said you were quite busy.’ Tara, the little imp. ‘I would have rung you at home but I didn’t have your number. And when I rang here for it, she said she couldn’t give it out.’
What on earth was Tara up to? ‘Next time, you might try the phone book.’
‘You’re listed?’
The disbelief in her voice amused him. ‘Yes. Probably one of the only people you know who is. And what’s a loaf of bread cost, Mrs Lester?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Sorry. It’s the sort of question they like to ask presidential candidates in the States – you know, to see how far removed they are from real life. George Bush visited a supermarket and admitted he’d never seen a bar code reader before.’
‘And that’s why Clinton won, I suppose?’
‘The key factor.’ He was enjoying this; his nervousness at seeing her again all but disappeared.
‘We’ll have to remember that when the campaign begins. I can’t believe there are many Tory MPs who know the price of a cob loaf. So it’s a useful tip.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I must dash. The car’s outside waiting.’
‘Terry the Runt.’
‘I’m afraid so. Shall I give him your regards?’
‘No, but you could tell me when I’ll see you again.’
She laughed outright. ‘What an effect you have on a girl. That was the main reason I came in here, and I almost forgot. Oh, by the way,’ she said, and her tone suddenly seemed artificially light, ‘the other day, when I’d left, did you stay on for a while?’
‘In the flat, you mean?’ She nodded, watching him carefully. ‘Only for a minute or two. Why?’
‘Nothing. It’s just the owner had some papers there, and he can’t find some of them. I thought maybe you’d picked them up by mistake.’
Careful, he told himself, for her reasoning was so transparently preposterous – ‘picked them up by mistake’ – that she might as well have asked him outright if he’d gone through Trachtenberg’s papers. He felt it very important now to lie well. So he opened his eyes a little more than usual, adopted an ‘aw shucks’ look of innocence learned from Marla, and put both hands up in mock-protestation. ‘Not me, guv. Honest. I didn’t hang about – the last thing I wanted was to meet the landlord.’
She nodded again. ‘I’d better be off. Are you about on Sunday afternoon?’
About? Looking at her now, Billings thought he would manacle himself to the phone if there were any chance of meeting up with her again. ‘I think so,’ he said.
‘You could come up.’
‘To Primrose Hill?’
She laughed again. ‘Don’t look so alarmed. No, not Primrose Hill – not yet anyway. But look, I’ll ring you.’
‘Do,’ he said, trying to keep the pleading note out of his voice. As she walked out of the gallery and down the street, she waved through the front window. He waved back, then turned around with a grin that was only slightly tempered by the gloomy look on Tara’s face. He felt elated by Holly’s brief visit, but nervous, too. He thought of the document he had taken from the Wimpole Street flat. He still didn’t understand what had led him to pinch it, but he certainly understood it was an important piece of paper, and that sa
me instinct had led him to hide it carefully in his own flat. Not in a locked drawer, not in a safe (he didn’t have one), but inside one of his many large illustrated books, in this case an edition of Andrew Wyeth (Houghton Mifflin, 1972). Not many burglars looking for a one-page document would have the nous or patience to shake out the pages of every book in his flat’s library, which despite Marla’s retention of his best books, was not inconsiderable.
What had Holly said about Primrose Hill? ‘Not yet.’ What did that mean? He had a wonderful feeling that he would be seeing much more of Holly Lester, and a less pleasing intimation that this meant he would soon be meeting Harry Lester, too.
Chapter 6
Billings was beginning to understand why single people dreaded weekends, for his were now long and dull.
Time was he and Marla went for walks, haunted bookshops and museums, and saw the latest flick; now he stayed in by himself, eating cold food and working on exhibition brochures. Even television was no solace; Saturday night’s viewing provided nothing to watch for anyone with more than three hours’ education.
He was not friendless; from school, university, and his early days in the London art world, he had any number of friends, many by definition long-standing. But whilst happy to have lunch with them in the West End, he was reluctant to see them at the weekends, since all but a few had families: in his reduced bachelor circumstance this made things difficult – he hated being the single man at dinner, and as a hopeless cook, he could not readily reciprocate hospitality.
In bridging the gap created by his years in New York, moreover, when he had seen English friends at most once or twice a year, Marla had not helped things. He thought, for example, of ringing the Anderson-Russells, once his closest friends in London. But a certain froideur lay over their friendship, ever since a dinner party given after Helen Anderson-Russell’s completion of a course at a Kensington cooking school. As Helen cleared the table and began to serve coffee, Marla had exclaimed helpfully, ‘Terrible food. But wonderful wine!’ Perhaps he wouldn’t ring them after all.
Rain on Saturday meant Billings stayed indoors all day, alternating between the small sitting room and even smaller study, moving between rooms as he grew tired of whatever he was reading. He felt less bored but more restless than usual because of the prospect of Holly’s call the next day.
On Sunday he left the flat only once, late in the morning, to buy a newspaper, but carefully left on his answering machine in case Holly telephoned. Seeing Marla lurking just off Goldhawk Road reinforced his inclination to stay in, and he worked briefly and desultorily on an article he had promised to write for British Painting on the young Paul Nash – at his best in the early years before he went abstract. Then he proofread brochures for his spring show, a mix of naturalist landscape practitioners and abstract artists. Three of the latter camp were holdovers from Miles, but he found it easy to overcome his slight prejudice against them (both for their paintings and for being inherited) when he saw that the prices they commanded were roughly double those of the painters he had recruited himself.
He was not opposed to abstract art per se; how could he be, when so much of it was so very beautiful? Who could look at a Motherwell, or Kline, or Stella and say, ‘that’s terrible’? Only an ideologue could; in his love for watercolours and landscapes Billings was able to resist turning a positive passion into a negative view of everything else. A good thing too, it seemed from his price list, unless he wished to run a small shop in Bethnal Green.
For lunch he ate half a cold chicken and drank half a bottle of Sancerre. In the afternoon, he watched cricket with a boring monograph about Hogarth on his lap, then repeated his lunch at dinner by eating and drinking the other halves. Still Holly hadn’t rung, and he felt irritated and disappointed. He didn’t feel he should ring her, and realized he couldn’t anyway, as he didn’t have her number and it was not, of course, listed in the phone book. As his weekend reverted to its usual melancholy flavour, he returned self-consciously to routine, preparing for work the following morning by going to bed early.
He slept badly and, feeling seedy after his solitary weekend, walked halfway to work before catching the Underground. He arrived at Cork Street to find Tara had already opened up. ‘Any calls?’ he asked.
‘Calls? I’ve only been here ten minutes.’
He shrugged. ‘I thought we could hang the bottom gallery today for the opening.’
‘Only the Lyttletons have come. The courier van was waiting when I got here. You don’t want to put these downstairs, do you?’
He would put them in the loo if money were no object, but Tara was right – financially it didn’t make any sense to hide them away. He went and unwrapped one of the half-dozen frames stacked neatly against the galley wall. Lyttleton, who rejoiced in the Christian name of ‘Sergio’, was hot at the moment. Another inheritance from Miles, he used silk screen to put large blocks of colour onto very fine canvas. This was derivative – Joseph Albers, Rothko, Morris Louis; you’d have to say it had been done thoroughly before, but it was also attractive, for the colours were lovely and rich, textured by the lines of the applying screen and the absorbent effects of the canvas. A dark and smoky blue, the green of the richest poplar tree, a charcoal that flashed an image of Holly Lester’s stockings. This last thought worsened his mood, especially as he looked more closely at the Lyttletons. What nettled Billings most about the Lyttletons was their selling point: a trail of faint hieroglyph carefully applied in a vertical line down the canvas centre with India ink. The tinkering seemed mechanical yet had appeal: the smallest canvas, the size of a portable television, cost £5,000; the largest – virtually a railway carriage window, which Tara now helped him unpack – reached £40,000.
The spring show was important to Billings, for although cash was flowing through the gallery of late, like rich gravy from a jug, he was having trouble ensuring that enough of it covered his own food. He was paying sixty-five pounds per square foot and had nineteen hundred square feet to pay for. Tara was on £22,000 a year, too much for a mere receptionist, but too little for such a knowledgeable assistant – he was going to have to give her a rise soon. Printing bills knocked him for six, especially after the low prices of the States; his last bill for an eight-page four-colour brochure on a photographic realist inherited from Miles, cost a little over three thousand pounds. He was taking little out of the business himself; most of what he did take went on the exorbitant rent he paid for the flat off Goldhawk Road, let when he left Marla on only a six-month lease.
He hung Lyttletons all morning, perversely putting two of them downstairs, then ate a sandwich in the galley while a bunch of non-buying Germans filled the upper floor. In mid-afternoon, the Professore came in quietly, fastidiously dressed, in a pink button-down shirt and a patterned tweed jacket which, through the hint of violet in its dominant green pattern, subtly indicated that it was foreign.
Billings had long before concluded that the man was a retired academic, from Padua perhaps, or was it Ferrara? Learned, speaking halting but fluent English, he had first been spotted by Billings inspecting some watercolours by Ivan Packworth, a Devonshire artist who loved to do series of pictures, moving from pencil sketch to gouache to oil, of the same scene, usually a river. Billings discovered that the Italian was an expert on Victorian watercolours, engaged in a personal search for twentieth-century equivalents. They became friendly; the Italian took to visiting the gallery weekly (always on Mondays), and Billings would bring out watercolours from storage and even from his own small but treasured collection, which he kept in the vault. It was an utterly uncommercial acquaintance, since the Professore never bought anything; Billings thought of him instead as a kind of critical auditor. Now he found him standing in front of the spot where the Burgess had hung, replaced by a luridly maroon Lyttleton. ‘Do you like it?’ Billings asked politely.
The Professore turned to him with an expression of alarm and shook his head. He waved a finger at the wall. ‘Dove Signor Burgess?’<
br />
‘It’s been sold,’ said Billings. ‘Usually it would still be here, but the spring show starts soon, and the buyer insisted on taking it away.’ He thought of his struggles to get the canvas in the taxi, en route to Primrose Hill. It suddenly seemed a long time ago.
The Professore put his hand over his eyes and shook his head. ‘I wanted to buy.’
Billings was deeply surprised. After months of the Professore’s visits, he had ceased to see him as a customer. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.
‘It is in good hands?’
He thought sourly of the uncommunicative Holly and the weird mish-mash of paintings in her bedroom. He shrugged. ‘I hope so. Would you like to see some other pictures? I have two Packworths for the spring show I haven’t hung yet.’
But the Professore shook his head. ‘No, but if ever the buyer is unhappy, please let me know. I loved the Burgess picture.’
Billings smiled. ‘So did I. I’m so sorry.’ The Professore left the gallery looking depressed, which increased Billings’s own sense of melancholy. He cursed Holly Lester, wishing she had never entered his gallery or his life.
Tara returned with the Standard, then made them each a mug of tea. He looked quickly at the headline. TORY MP DIES: NOW IT’S DOWN TO ONE.
‘One more to go,’ said Tara, nodding at the paper. Billings quickly scanned the article. Sir Jock Nichols, a veteran backbencher from the Midlands, had been found dead that morning at his home. No cause of death was mentioned, which caught Billings’s attention, since Nichols was only fifty-seven. So now the outright Tory majority was a single MP. In the Standard, the Prime Minister expressed regrets at Nichols’s death, then voiced his determination to stay on in office. The paper pointed out that, theoretically, the election could be over twelve months away.
The rest of the day passed quickly, with many spring tourists coming in, though none proved buyers. He sent Tara home and locked the front door at five thirty, then in an end of day ritual, imported from New York, he sat with a glass of white wine and read Daisy Carrera’s favourable views of the new Lucien Freud exhibition. At quarter to six the telephone rang. ‘Are you still open?’ a voice crackled from what sounded like a mobile.
Holly Lester Page 5
