‘Fine,’ said Trachtenberg and Ferguson in unison.
‘I take it this place is safe enough. You said it belongs to Fritz Kimmo.’
There was the slightest of pauses. ‘That’s right. So you could always say you were seeing him, and we can always say we’re seeing Sally. That’s what’s nice about a politically hybrid marriage.’
‘As long as no one thinks I’m seeing Sally and you’re seeing Fritz.’ The man laughed maliciously. ‘This looks a right little love nest, if you ask me.’
Ferguson laughed. ‘We could probably lend it to you if you like.’
‘I’d better be off.’ Mr Pukka seemed less happy being teased than teasing.
‘We’ll come with you,’ said Trachtenberg, and Billings exhaled slowly with relief. He waited patiently until he heard the front door close, listened for voices (there were none) then shot out of bed and got dressed. He gave it five minutes, then left the building, knowing that – as with the Thatcher memo he’d pocketed – he’d been privy to discussions not meant for his ears. What on earth would he have said if, say, the man named Ferguson had looked into the bedroom and found him lying there?
He saw Holly again the next evening, but decided to say nothing about the episode from the night before. In his mind, he associated it with the Thatcher memo, and since he’d lied to her about that he felt it impossible to tell her the truth about the Trachtenberg meeting. He could tell that Hamish Ferguson was clearly Labour, and Trachtenberg he knew about by now of course, but who was the other man? The Tory spy Holly had mentioned? Possibly, but he sounded too grand for the low level gay Holly had mentioned.
In the following days, as he continued to see her, his thoughts were in any case focused on Holly – on his growing feelings for her, coupled with the burgeoning realization that there seemed no possible real future to his relationship with her. This heightened the carpe diem freneticism of their encounters, and made the repeated meetings in those three weeks seem an unreal bonus. ‘I feel as if I’ve won the Lottery,’ said Billings one evening as he undressed her. She flashed a smile with complicit feeling, then frowned. ‘Even Lottery money runs out,’ she said sadly.
And so he was not altogether surprised in the third week of their nightly – or really daily, since it was always early evening and in spring still light outside – assignations, when, as he lay talking quietly with Holly about Sebastian, her little boy, that he heard the front door of the flat open and shut, then a pair of shoes march in a quick and clicking pace across the sitting room floor. There was a knock on the door, Billings pulled the covers over them both, and the tall figure of Alan Trachtenberg entered the room. He looked once, witheringly, at Billings, then addressed himself to Holly.
‘You had better get dressed, my dear,’ he said, with no affection in his voice.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked, sounding scared.
‘The press are everywhere and Harry’s waiting for you to return from your personal trainer.’ He resolutely didn’t look at Billings. ‘Come on,’ he said, spitting the words, ‘get a move on. That sad Tory cunt’s called a General Election. In six weeks’ time, if you listen to me, you’ll be living in Downing Street.’
Part Two
Chapter 8
He couldn’t tell how the picture had been stolen, or exactly when. Tuesday morning he went downstairs to unlock the vault room, and immediately noticed the empty space on the wall, low down in the corner. A single picture hook remained, forlornly.
The missing picture was a Burgess watercolour, a lovely landscape of the Vale of the White Horse, using improbable colours (orange for a meadow, a sinuous green for a stream in the foreground) that somehow worked. A snip at £750, though now it seemed someone had got it for free. Why steal this, when upstairs a Tyson fetched twenty times that, and a Leonard Starker near the gallery’s front was even dearer still? In fact, you would have been hard pushed to find a cheaper picture for sale in the whole of the spring show.
He opened the door to the vault room, thinking hard. The Burgess had been hanging there the day before at closing – he was sure he would have noticed the gap on the wall when he went to lock the vault room. So it must have gone in the night, and he opened the vault room with trepidation, expecting its window to be broken, the metal covering bars cut, the room’s contents gone.
But nothing was amiss. The window was undisturbed, locked and safely barred; the canvases stacked against the wall looked very much like the same canvasses there when he had locked up sixteen hours before. The only odd item was a tin of Coke, half-empty, sitting on a counter top.
He took this with him upstairs and showed it to Tara when she came in. ‘You left this downstairs,’ he said.
She shook her head immediately. ‘Never touch the stuff. Too much sugar, too much exploitation of innocent Third World appetites. I’d ban it, if it were up to me.’
‘I found it in the vault room. If it isn’t yours, who’s been in there?’
Tara shrugged. ‘No one that I know of. Maybe Mrs D’Olivera.’
The cleaner, but she’d left before he’d shut up shop. ‘Well, unless you’ve sold the Burgess downstairs, someone’s gone and pinched it.’
‘Sold the Burgess? You don’t mean the one your friend Mrs Lester bought?’ He shook his head. ‘You mean the watercolour?’ She looked at him with the mixture of incredulity and pity that entered her voice when any watercolour was the subject of discussion.
‘I think I’d better phone the police.’ Now she looked at him with even greater amazement. He could see why: half a tin of Coca-Cola and an unoccupied picture hook would seem insufficient reason to ring Inspector Plod.
But what else could he do? he asked himself as a customer approached and saved him from further ridicule by asking Tara for help. Billings walked downstairs and went into the vault again. He examined the paintings stacked against the wall one by one; halfway through them, he found the Burgess.
The non-theft was not the only odd occurrence, and Billings had found the usually sedate routine of his professional life punctured by a succession of unsettling events. He had arrived one morning to find a large brick on the pavement outside the gallery, and a visible dent in the metal grill that shielded the gallery’s window panes during the night. Then his post had arrived the next morning with a note from the Bolivian jewellers next door, explaining it had been mistakenly delivered there. When Billings had popped his head in at the neighbouring shop to say thank you, he had discovered that neither the receptionist nor the proprietor had any idea what he was talking about.
And then one evening he had found Marla on his doorstep off the Goldhawk Road, holding the lead of an uncharacteristically healthy-looking Sam. ‘Yes, Marla,’ he greeted her testily.
‘It’s not what you think,’ she said.
‘What is it then?’
‘I just thought you should know. Three times now I’ve seen a van parked just here,’ she said motioning at the kerb. ‘One time the driver was knocking on your door. I thought he must be trying to deliver something, but when I asked if I could help he said no. He wasn’t very nice about it.’
Billings said nothing, trying to interpret this new information. Marla mistook this for his by now habitual annoyance. ‘Sometimes I bring Sam this way on his walk, but I’m not spying on you, honest. I just want to see if you’re okay,’ she said, and her voice faltered slightly. ‘I won’t walk by here if you’d rather I didn’t.’
For once he found himself feeling sorry for her. ‘I don’t mind if you walk this way, Marla. Honestly, I don’t mind at all. And thanks for telling me. If you see this man again, could you let me know? And try and take the registration number?’
Inside he found nothing sinister in the flat. The obvious targets of burglary were undisturbed – his television, the silver (such as it was), some cash in the bedside table drawer. He opened the Andrew Wyeth volume carefully, found the document he had so rashly lifted from the Wigmore Street flat, then breathed easy on all co
unts.
Surely these mysteries were connected with Holly, but quite how he was at a loss to explain – and there seemed little chance of getting any explanation from her. He had not seen her since Alan Trachtenberg had announced the General Election from the far end of the Wigmore Street bed. When Trachtenberg had withdrawn to wait for Holly in the foyer downstairs, she and Billings had dressed quickly. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ Billings had said, putting on his trousers.
‘What about?’
‘Getting caught like this.’
Holly had said caustically, ‘Don’t worry. There isn’t much Alan doesn’t know.’
So he had known about the use to which they put his flat. ‘You can trust him then?’
‘Trust Alan? You must be joking. Put it this way: I have as much on him as he has on me. That’s the best reason I can think of to “trust” anyone.’ She picked up her handbag. ‘I’d better leave first, in case there are any reporters outside.’
‘All right. I’m not sure it’s even worth asking when I’ll see you again.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s all systems go for the next six weeks. After that, we’ll just have to see. I’ll ring you, though. And you’ve got my mobile number.’
‘I’d be scared to use it.’
She came over and straightened his tie. ‘Wish us luck then.’
He kissed her softly and she shivered, then pushed him gently away with both hands. He said, ‘I wish you luck. And love.’
She looked at him tenderly. ‘I know you do. Bye-bye for now.’
Ten days later she had still not been in touch, but following the campaign through the papers and television he could see why.
After an impromptu press conference on the front steps of the Primrose Hill House, Harry Lester had headed north to his constituency, accompanied by Holly and something like three hundred journalists. On the next day, in a local school, he had set out the Labour Manifesto – titled A CLEAN CHANGE – with a vigorous confidence that had impressed the press and put a positive spin from the start on the Labour campaign.
Holly played her part, alternating between demure public appearances with her husband, and press interviews intended to show off her own accomplishments without, that is, diminishing those of her spouse or scaring off middle class voters happy to have their Prime Minister’s wife work provided she did so quietly. From the many profiles that appeared, Billings learned little about her which he didn’t already know; the exception to this was the detailed scrutiny of her professional life, something she had never talked about in any detail. In the same way as she avoided politics in her evening conversations with him, presumably because he was the one sanctuary she found from the political maelstrom, so had she largely omitted any account of her work, and Billings was surprised to learn just how successful she was. He had thought the words ‘independent consultancy’ were confined largely to middle-aged men made redundant, and was astonished to learn from the Telegraph that her annual earnings were estimated at a cool £300,000. Baffled by how the pleasing results of his spring show (he had sold all but six paintings and four of those were less expensive watercolours) could translate into such little profit, he wished he had asked Holly for practical advice in the weeks when he had seen her daily.
Already in these first ten days, as Holly’s profile grew higher and higher, his relationship with her again assumed an air of unreality. He knew what had happened between them was more than a fling to him, and he knew this time that yes, it had all happened; but he had no way of gauging its importance to Holly, and the way things were going with the campaign, suggesting almost certain victory for Labour, he couldn’t see any way in which they could take up together again in the future.
Yet Billings was engrossed by the political spectacle unfolding around him, and occasionally asked himself why. Perhaps because his relationship with Holly meant he knew one of the key players; perhaps too because loving Holly made him feel like a teenager who apes the interest of a favourite teacher – swotting up on the botany of tree bark, for example, or reading the more obscure Renaissance dramatists. For a brief moment – well, half an hour at any rate – he genuinely thought of somehow taking politics seriously. He would read Aristotle’s Politics, and move onto Hobbes’ Treatise, Locke’s Essay, even Rousseau’s – what? Confessions? He would bring this newly acquired learning to bear in perceptive analysis of the present day.
Analysis of what precisely? And for whom? Sanity soon returned, or rather the deflating wisdom of New York, as in don’t be such a jerk. Words spoken once by Ratner, his first employer in Gotham, an awful man who’d added memorably to this injunction, Forget watercolours. There’s no margin in fucking watercolours. Vulgar, but sadly true, as was the edict, he felt, that now popped up in Billings’s head, spoken though in Ratner’s Brooklynese – don’t be such a jerk. So the Politics went unread, likewise Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, but his interest in the campaign did not flag, and he watched the spectacle agape.
For the campaign came as a revelation – or really, a recovered memory, as American pop psychology would say – of a darker kind of remembering. Many of the things Holly had said to him – sometimes in the throes of passion, sometimes half-slumbering, occasionally as a dispassionate part of general chat – now came back to Billings as he watched events unfolding. How he wished he had paid more attention to what she had said at the time.
What was happening, he realized, was just what Holly had said would happen: Labour campaigned generally, positively, almost presidentially. The Tories, by contrast, had fallen immediately into internal bickering – over Europe, the pound, even over that hoary old chestnut, capital punishment. The standard assumption that during the course of the campaign Labour’s enormous lead would inevitably erode no longer seemed certain, and ten days later there were no signs of Labour faltering, or of the Tories coming together in desperation. The usual alarms about Labour – Red scares, the prospect of 98% taxation, mandatory homosexual headmasters – simply failed to take hold, whereas the Labour assault on a Tory regime, whose body politic was encased in mud, did.
Of its own policies, A CLEAN CHANGE said nothing that was not hopeful and anodyne and impossible to pin down. Struggling to read it one evening, Billings remembered one of his few overtly political conversations with Holly. ‘You don’t sound left wing at all,’ he had told her.
‘I should hope not. It’s the last impression we’re trying to give.’
‘But what about socialism? I mean, naturally people like me don’t believe in it, but I thought people like you were supposed to.’
She had smiled at him forgivingly. ‘Sometimes your naivety is almost touching. Where do I start? The old ideologies aren’t relevant any more. We could no more go back to the ways of old Labour than we could restore real power to the monarchy.’
‘But that suggests there’s no real difference between you and the Tories. So why should anyone vote one way or the other?’
‘Because we’re fresh and have more ideas, because we’re better at what we do. And most important, because we’re not corrupt.’
‘It’s personalities then, not the policies that matter.’
Holly had begun to nod, then caught herself. ‘Of course it’s not that simple.’
‘I’m sure it’s not.’
As Harry Lester travelled in limelight fashion around the major cities of England, his circuit began to take on the air of a triumphant processional; the Prime Minister, holed up at Ten Downing Street in an effort to appear authoritative, looked reclusive, even frightened instead. The Tories were falling apart.
But not without a helping hand – the very words Holly used when she half-predicted, half-hoped for, just such an orgy of self-destruction that seemed to be happening to the Tories. Whose helping hand? he had asked. She had snorted. Sometimes I think half our time is spent plotting their downfall, instead of planning our rise.
Certainly the campaign suggested this. After an extensive interview early in the campaign left
Harry Lester flustered and, to the unkind observer, almost witless in his wittering replies, he took an extended leave of absence from such probings, proving about as amenable as Ronald Reagan to the interrogations of the Fourth Estate, and delivering only set texts. ‘What you’ll see,’ said Holly, speaking to Billings as if it were manifest that he was an outsider, which at once infuriated and reassured him, ‘is politics as puppeteering. Henry White will say something,’ she said of the future Chancellor of the Exchequer; ‘Eeley will say something; even Harry will say something. Yet everything they say will have been vetted by Millbank.’
‘Who’s Millbank?’
‘It’s a place, stupid. You know, the tower on the river. Where the media campaign’s controlled. Alan practically lives there.’
Alan again. Clearly if not Rasputin, then nonetheless the mastermind.
So why were these odd things happening to him? Whose attention had he drawn? Trachtenberg, of course, but who else? How twitchy should he feel, how scared, as these impersonal forces seemed to circle around him? But all he really felt was loneliness, which he knew the police couldn’t cure. He missed Holly.
Chapter 9
He did not admit as much to McBain who, after several rejections, had managed to cajole him into lunch at Chez Gerard, all of a hundred yards from the gallery. Billings tried to keep conversation confined to their usual shop talk: Kenneth Clarke’s continuing relevance as a theoretician of landscape, the difference (if any) between Action painting and Abstract Expressionism, and whether Edward Cooley, eponymous owner of a gallery around the corner, was sleeping with his new receptionist.
Nevertheless, McBain insisted on talking about the forthcoming Election, in part because his editor had instructed him to focus in his column on the impact a new government would have on the Arts. Over his prawn starter he complained, ‘I’m supposed to ponce about at parties with the likes of Sally Kimmo, pretending I’m a luvvie or something.’
Holly Lester Page 8
