Holly Lester by Andrew Rosenheim

7
    This time he did see her tomorrow, and the evening after that, and the evening after that, and even the evening after that. Holly was away for the weekend in Harry’s constituency, but he saw her every evening in the following week as well. And the week after that.
    Later Billings was to remember these few weeks (really only three) as ones of singular preoccupation. He must have gone to work in the gallery each day, seen customers, done business, kept an eye on the turnover of the spring show (very impressive, despite the strong pound many foreign collectors were buying), yet later he could not have told you anything at all about these weeks except the anticipation, which mounted through each day, of the Audi’s arrival at a quarter to six, the quick drive to the Wimpole Street flat, and the subsequent immersion in each other that followed the shutting of the flat’s door.
    It seemed illusorily focused, like the passions of first love, and this unreality was accelerated by the very real sense in which Billings found his private world of Holly Lester paralleled by public accounts of it. Press interest in Harry was now intense; the scare given to the government by Jock Nichols’s death heightened the attention paid to its likely successor. After the initial round of profiles following Harry Lester’s election as leader the year before, things had quietened; now interest flared up again.
    Profiles of Holly came out in abundance, too. On Sunday the
Telegraph
ran a piece next to the leader page. Expecting the worst, Billings was surprised to find it cordial, even complimentary. On Monday evening he said as much to Holly. ‘Now you know why I’m so confident we’ll win,’ she said, ‘if even the
Telegraph
has nice things to say.’
    They usually had no more than an hour together, sometimes an hour and a half, at which point Holly would leap up, energized by lovemaking, and rush off to a fund-raising dinner, or a meeting of female candidates, or even occasionally supper at home with Harry and her child.
    For Billings, the sex remained compulsively explosive; it seemed to be that way for Holly, too, since she continued to whoop with such abandon that Billings took to closing the window when they first came in. They usually made love quickly, hungrily, conventionally, then lay talking until either Holly had to go or Billings found himself ready again. Physically, he found her simply luscious, the voluptuousness of her heightened by the disguise of a chic veneer of smart, sharp clothes.
    And he found he simply liked talking with her as well. Obviously, part of Holly’s attraction lay in the fact of just who she was, the wife of Harry Lester. But, curiously, or perhaps naturally, as he came to know her better, it was perfectly normal aspects of their daily lives they talked about most – her work, for example, and how it was drying up as she found herself forced to avoid clients posing even the remotest conflict of interest. Also about his work, and how his gallery business seemed to prosper without enriching him at all. And art, about which she had wild, extravagant opinions, which unsettled Billings with their mixture of insight and trendy lunacy.
    Still, the contrast between the public persona and the private Holly was also a topic of conversation between them. One evening Holly lay in the day bed while Billings sat in the corner chair and read aloud from an
Evening Standard
profile of her. ‘It says your first job was serving ice cream on Brighton pier, aged sixteen, to trippers during the summer holidays.’
    â€˜Does it say what my second job was?’
    He read on diligently. ‘No. You went to Oxford on an exhibition, and it was all uphill from there.’ Meeting Harry in her last year, she took a First in PPE, then did two years at INSEAD (Harry trundled over on the odd weekend, diligently showing up, like the young Richard Nixon wooing his own wife, even when