Holly Lester (11 page)

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.

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.'

‘Kimmo? I've heard of her,' he said carefully.

‘You'll hear more. Her husband owns the largest Liechtenstein Bank. But he lives in London and has an estate in Scotland – it's meant to be bigger than Liechtenstein itself. He's a Finn, probably the world's single richest Finn. Ironically, he was a major Thatcher supporter; Sally is equally keen on Labour. Next to Saatchi, she probably has the largest collection of trendy second-rate contemporary art in this country.'

‘And who is Hamish Ferguson?'

‘He'll be Lester's Press Secretary. Used to be the Labour correspondent for the
FT
. The single most confident man I've ever met. With the exception of Alan Trachtenberg, that is. Why?'

‘The press keep mentioning him. Do you come across him?'

‘As little as possible. But the Arts are a big part of the Manifesto, and I can predict exactly what's going to happen.' He began to speak in a PR man's staccato: ‘There will be a major administrative reshuffle – the Arts Council will be completely reconstituted with predictable howls from the bureaucrats displaced. But nothing will really change. After twelve months of penny-pinching by the Chancellor, suddenly he will announce a major programme of spending, all supposedly based on the new economies Labour has discovered in the flatulent waistline they've inherited from the Tories. The arts will be among the smaller recipients of largesse, but the mere fact that spending seems to be up will win the government disproportionate plaudits from the twats who think Covent Garden is the be all and end all of cultural life. People like Matthew King will be chucked out of government – they're old Labour and really do care whether the opera makes it more than once every ten years to Doncaster. Where the money will go is into the London One Thousand project.'

‘The what?'

‘London One Thousand. The millennium of our fair city. Opportunity for a Labour government to build an enormous national project of purely symbolic value that simply can't go wrong.'

‘But what is it?'

‘Nobody knows for sure. Something like the Great Exhibition of 1851. Or the New York World's Fair of, what was it, 1961? Something along those lines.'

‘But why on earth is that important? Who cares about that?'

‘Alan Trachtenberg, because it has two advantages: it seems to make financial sense, since it should bring even more tourists to London (just what we all want, heh?);
and
it will let him make its mark as his baby – something which beefing up the Poetry Society or helping the RSC would never let him do. You don't get remembered for keeping a pre-existing organisation alive, do you, not when you can create something yourself from scratch.'

‘Are you going to write that?'

McBain shrugged and drank more Chablis. ‘Eventually. Labour's going to win, so there will be plenty of time. I have to say, though, that this is the fourth Election I've covered and I've never seen anything like it.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean that the Tories can't seem to get started.'

‘Labour's running a good campaign,' Billings said, a little surprised to hear himself coming to its defence.

‘Sure, in a purely negative way. I admit that Harry Lester is polished, smooth, attractive, almost folksy – perfect for a new Prime Minister sweeping aside twenty years of Tory rule. But he's also' – here McBain paused dramatically – ‘
not that bright
. He's like a walking version of
Prospect
Magazine. Serious, yes, and intellectually pretentious, which goes a long way into making people think you know what you're talking about. But he doesn't, really; any time the going gets tough, he hides behind his own hard men, or wraps himself in the Church. He's never personally fired anybody in his life; never personally argued through a really contentious issue with opponents who know their own minds. There weren't any Militant Tendency in his constituency, I can tell you that.'

‘Meaning what?'

‘Simply that in this campaign you're not going to see anything of Harry Lester other than pre-planned carefully orchestrated appearances.'

‘That doesn't seem particularly suspicious to me. Whatever you think of Harry Lester, Labour's got nowhere to go but down in the next few weeks. I wouldn't risk anything if I didn't have to.'

‘Something smells.'

Billings sniffed. ‘That's just the grill – don't worry, nothing's on fire.'

McBain looked exasperated. ‘Something smells in the
campaign
. Not here, you cretin. Every time the Tories make the slightest sign of getting out of the starting blocks, something happens and they get set back again. Think about it.'

‘Labour's good at counterpunching, that's all.'

‘I don't think so. There's more to it than that. Yes, yes, I know about their database, and the high tech set-up at Millbank, and you don't have to tell me how cross they get about even the mildest criticism. But that still doesn't explain how these stories keep coming out at precisely the worst moment for the Conservatives.'