So much happened so quickly that the schedule established by Holly gave him the illusory sense of order in his life, and control. And there were no more weird events, no sense of being watched or followed or tampered with. On Tuesday mornings he would dutifully taxi over to Whitehall, then lunch in the one clear spare room of Ten Downing Street upstairs with Holly. Sometimes they had sandwiches. On Thursdays he would leave the gallery early, take a cab up to Primrose Hill, play football in the park with Sebastian, and then, as the boy had his tea with Carrie the nanny, see Holly. He dutifully worked away at plans for the redecoration of Ten Downing Street. It turned out that R-A’s wife Elizabeth had worked for three years at Colefax and Fowler, and despite her spouse’s lofty disdain for Billings’s involvement with a Labour regime, she was excited at the prospect of helping him, since she was otherwise housebound with three small children. Soon he was trucking fabric samples and swatches of carpet to Primrose Hill, where he and Holly spread them out on the bedroom floor and begin to make decisions.
