Holly Lester (14 page)

by Harry Lester MP

Tuesday 7 May at 7.30pm

Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Westminster

‘Who on earth asked you to that?' inquired Tara from behind his shoulder. ‘You've never voted Labour in your life.'

‘Mind your own business. Anyway, how do you know how I vote? Don't jump to conclusions.'

Tara snorted. ‘It's all since Madame Hoity-Toity bought that picture. I think you're positively smitten.'

He tried to laugh this off. ‘Smitten is a middle-aged word. Honestly, how am I going to keep up with the younger generation if you're talking like a matron? Anyway, tell me more about your feminist exhibition.'

The diversion worked, and Tara rattled off her latest list of the women painters she proposed to show in autumn. He had been most reluctant when she had first broached the idea, having strong preconceptions of what Tara's preferred painters' work would look like – nails hammered onto phallic outlines, or minimalist collages of paperclips – but he had been very pleasantly surprised by the quality of her proposals for inclusion. There were eight artists chosen so far, out of some forty-odd whose work they had looked at. And agreeing on the eight had proved possible, indeed enjoyable – Tara and he seemed to appreciate the same degree of abstraction, which was to say little or none. ‘You're more conservative than I realized,' he had remarked. Clearly taken aback, Tara had thought about this, then put a finger to her lips. ‘Don't tell anyone, okay?'

From the limousines outside and the number of arriving taxis, Billings felt he must have been the only man in attendance who had taken the Underground to come and hear Harry Lester. He handed over his card of invitation at the door and was directed to a mezzanine level, where several hundred people already stood talking and drinking wine. Most were smartly dressed in suits and evening dresses, though a few younger people wore the drab costume of black polo neck and black trousers that seemed mandatory for people under thirty years of age.

He recognized many faces, which served at first to reduce the mild anxiety he felt at any party of strangers; his unease increased, however, as he realized that he didn't
know
any of these people – he had simply seen their faces on the box or in the papers. White, the Shadow Chancellor, was joking in a corner with three younger women. He looked less rough, and less big in person than on television. Bruce, the one symbol of Old Labour still prominent in Shadow Cabinet politics (he was Shadow Secretary for Trade and Industry) was eating nuts by the handful and taking great gulps of wine while a young reporter wrote down what he intermittently said. He was wide-shouldered and square-faced, but surprisingly short – Billings would have guessed him to be very little more than five feet tall.

There were other prominent Party figures and several television reporters Billings found familiar but could not have named. But there was no sign of Holly – not even Terry the Runt seemed present. He moved slowly across the room, excusing himself as he moved through the crowd, as if he were going somewhere with a purpose, when in fact he simply wanted a corner to stand against from which he could survey the crowd and pretend to be comfortable with his utter lack of personal acquaintance with anyone there.

Suddenly things changed. ‘Mr Billings?' A tall young man suddenly appeared at his side. He was either completely bald or had shaved his head to epidermic perfection. He had three spikes in his left ear and wore a gold chain necklace over an open-necked purple shirt. His manner nonetheless was conventional and polite. ‘I'm Nicky. Would you come this way please?'

Puzzled, Billings followed the man back through the crowd to another corner of the room. They came up behind a couple talking intently; when Nicky tapped the man on the shoulder and stood aside, Billings was face to face with him. It was Alan Trachtenberg.

‘Hello stranger,' said Trachtenberg with a flourish, then turned sideways and introduced Billings to the woman he had been talking to. ‘This is Sally Kimmo, and this is James Billings, our new convert to the cause.'

She extended a hand, saying, ‘I've heard so much about you.'

He nodded, but assumed she was confusing him with someone else. He was struck by her clothes: in her fifties, she had nondescript black hair and a face which, by the most generous assessment, could barely be called handsome, but she was a striking figure just the same. She had kept her figure, and wore a simple tight black skirt – Bruce Oldfield? Armani? Billings knew only it had to be such a name – with a single loop of freshwater pearls and matching earrings. The cut of the skirt, the understatedly perfect tan, and the elegance of her jewellery made their mark.

‘We were talking about the Constables,' said Trachtenberg, and for a moment Billings wondered if they were present as well at this do. Then he remembered: Getty were trying to buy seven of them from a Northern museum down on its luck.

Sally Kimmo said, ‘Frankly, I can't get very worked up about it. It's not as if there weren't a lot of Constables to see in this country. And without travelling two hundred miles. I'd gladly give them the lot if it meant getting Kitaj back to London.'

This was such a treasonous assessment to Billings that he thought it most polite to ignore it. ‘I don't know,' he said lightly to Trachtenberg, deciding that if his putative nemesis was going to act light-hearted he should do the same. ‘It seems to me that here's an opportunity for you to spend some money saving national treasures that aren't based in London. You'll get two for the price of one: patriotism
and
the provinces.'

Trachtenberg looked coldly at him, as if to say
leave the phrasing to me darling,
but then he smiled smoothly. ‘I like that,' he declared, as if Billing's petition for membership to his club had just escaped his blackball. ‘We can tell the Getty that the bidding's with Bradford.'

‘Why not?' asked Sally Kimmo rhetorically, with the slightest hint of accent – Swiss perhaps? – though Billings could tell her heart lay in London. He had yet to meet a foreigner interested in art who took any real interest in, or had any real attachment to, anywhere provincial.

‘So you'd block the export license?' Trachtenberg asked him, still breezy, but with a certain steel to his voice that seemed reminiscent of their earlier odd encounter –
that sad Tory cunt's called a General Election
. Billings suddenly realized he was no longer in his usual world of hypotheticals – in a few weeks' time, presumably Trachtenberg
could
block the export license. Billings associated money and power with New York, where he had grown accustomed to his occasional attendance at the confluence of the two – dinner, say, on Fifth Avenue seated between the Deputy Mayor and a MOMA trustee. But his low-key life re-entering London meant he was nervous now, back again in High and putatively Highbrow Society.

Caught between politesse and vigour, Billings opted for the latter. ‘Absolutely,' he snapped. ‘You'll find there's very little to lose on the political front. It distances you from the Tories, who would take the higher bid – fine art's just another market to them, and Getty's money is as good as any the provinces can offer. And this way, you get the nationalist vote. As well as the soppy art community – like me.' He paused, looking for a pithy way to round off this untypically forthright sound-bite. ‘Politically, keeping the Constables can't lose.'

Trachtenberg gave him a long look of appraisal. He, too, was dressed beautifully, in a sharkskin suit of grey that could be New York – Paul Stuart – or Milan. He wore a rainbow tie of knitted wool and had a red rose in his buttonhole. As he continued to look at him, Billings resisted the temptation to say anything more, opting instead to look back at the man, not icily, not coldly, but steadily nonetheless. The growing awkwardness of this standoff was cut short by Sally Kimmo. ‘We must talk again soon,' she said to Billings, reaching again for his hand. ‘I'm so pleased to have met you.'

When she had left, each man looked down at his glass. Nicky of the spiked ear appeared again and Trachtenberg looked up and smiled at him in relief. ‘Ah Nicky,' he said fondly, ‘I'm glad you're here.' He turned to Billings. ‘I'm sure you'll understand that your invitation went out rather late. It's standing room only in the hall, so I do hope you won't mind where we've put you. Do come backstage afterwards. If you think it appropriate.' And before the sting in this tail (‘appropriate') had sunk in, Trachtenberg had walked away.

Billings looked at Nicky, who smiled perfunctorily but seemed embarrassed. ‘Please follow me,' he said and led Billings across the mezzanine to the lifts. Everyone else seemed to be going down the stairs to the auditorium where Harry Lester would speak.

In the lift Nicky pushed the button for the top floor and they began to ascend. ‘Where are we going?' asked Billings.

‘I guess Alan didn't really explain. There are simply no seats left in the Hall. But he wanted you at least to hear the speech.'

Mystified, Billings followed him out of the lift, down a corridor, out a fire door, up a short flight of metal stairs, then through an unmarked door into a long low-ceilinged room, an odd eyrie tucked in the uppermost corner of the building. There was a sandalwood conference table running down its centre, with tan chairs of soft leather placed around it. At its far end sat an immense leather sofa, with a television behind it on a table. Its screen displayed a long shot of a stage, with an unoccupied podium in its centre.

‘Alan says help yourself,' said Nicky, pointing to a bar by the door which held a vast array of spirits – whisky, vodka, gin, even rum – and mixers of every conceivable sort. ‘Enjoy Mr Lester's speech. If you need anything,' and he pointed to a phone on the wall, ‘ring 347. That's 347. Someone will pick up right away. When the speech is over, come down to the manager's office if you like, and I'll take you backstage.'

It was only when Nicky had left that Billings started to sense how peculiar his treatment had been. So there were no seats available, but weren't people standing in the back of the auditorium? He imagined Trachtenberg would be one of them, mobile phone in hand, barking orders into it about the lighting on Harry or the preliminary music.

The bar was completely fresh; nothing had been touched. He opened a litre bottle of Teachers and poured a healthy two inches, then added Strathmore water from a small bottle, fantasizing briefly that if business stayed as bad as it was, perhaps he could start importing
American
fizzy water – something manifestly from that continent, preferably with a Native American Indian name.
Damariscotta Springs
, or
Muskegon Mineral
. Something like that.

At the end of the table Billings found the television's remote control. Turning up the volume, he sat down in one of the soft chairs and swung round to watch the events taking place one hundred feet below him. He turned up the sound and watched as a grey-haired man walked across the podium to the stage and quickly began to speak. He looked like a corporate businessman, and thinking of his invitation Billings realized he
was
a businessman. It was the CBI hosting the event, yet another sign of Labour's mainstream appeal.

The man's introduction was neutral, low key, banal; without any sense of pace it suddenly yielded to Harry Lester, who walked quietly across the stage. For a moment the applause seemed disproportionate to the television Billings was watching; then he realized he was hearing it through the floor under him as well.

Lester briefly acknowledged the applause, set his script on the podium before him, and began to speak, so quietly at first that Billings turned up the volume on the remote control.
My invitation to speak here tonight
, he was saying,
is just one more indication of a new spirit in this great nation of ours. It is a healing spirit, one which binds wounds rather than opens them; brings people together rather than sets them apart
.

His voice was rising now in pitch and volume, and as it did his arms came alive as well, moving up cupped together in front of his chest, then opening to the side as if to embrace his audience. The effect was sufficiently distracting to make Billings lose track of Lester's words. Concentrating on them made him realize that he hadn't been missing a lot.

They look at people and say, what class do they belong to? They listen to a person's accent, not to their words. They judge someone on the cut of their clothes, not the cut of their intellect, or the size of their spirit.

As an assault on the Tories, this seemed relatively tame, but Billings reckoned it served further to paint Labour as a moderate and mending force of British politics. Finding his own spirits near depletion, he got up and added a hefty slosh of Scotch to his glass. He supposed he would have to stick it out for the duration in this odd little hideaway, but he couldn't see the point of his invitation. Had Trachtenberg superficially acceded to Holly's request that Billings be there, then used the opportunity to insult him? It seemed a peculiar way to cause offense. Billings wished he had brought something to read; such was the grim functionality of this meeting room that there weren't even prints on the walls to examine.

‘You should be watching more carefully. There's still a lot about the Party you need to learn.'

‘Christ you scared me!' he said, having poured roughly half his drink over his hand.

‘Aren't you glad to see me?' Holly closed the door and stood still, looking at him with an enormous smile. Her eyes – which the papers and even the television never adequately displayed – danced wondrously, big as marbles.

‘I am very glad to see you.' Putting down his drink, he took a paper napkin and dried his hands. ‘I was wondering exactly what I was doing here. I thought maybe Alan was letting me know he wanted me out of the way.'