by Barbara Vine
“Hebe's husband asked me to take her jewelry and do what I liked with it. I've been getting rid of her clothes to charity shops. Would you like to see some of the things?”
This time he did speak. “Thank you, I would.”
He has a beautiful voice, measured, civilized, very public school. And now relief was in his tone. I guessed this was because he understood that I'd asked him here not to harangue him or threaten him but simply to make that very ordinary and usual gesture of offering a memento of the dead to the bereaved.
There was nowhere in this flat where I could be out of sight of a visitor but the bathroom. I couldn't pretend Hebe's things were anywhere but where they are, in the kitchen drawer. However, he didn't watch me. He sat in his fireside chair, looking out of the window beside him at the uninspiring landscape of Kilburn—Brondesbury borders, the terrace of red-brick villas climbing the hillside, the squat Nonconformist church. I took all the jewelry but the pearls out of the drawer, put them on a tray, a plastic thing with a selection of British birds on it, and carried it over to him, putting it down on my mail-order flat-pack coffee table.
He expects to see the pearls, of course, and sees instead the string of red glass beads, the silver-gilt chain off which the gilt is peeling, a red and a green plastic bangle, something which I think is an anklet, a white metal ring with a large pink stone that is probably glass, half a dozen pairs of earrings, trashy sparkly things, and a pink porcelain brooch in the shape of a rose.
“She had some good things too,” I said, and I know he thought I was going to mention the pearls. “Her engagement ring, a locket, and a gold bracelet. Gerry wants to keep those, as you can imagine.”
“Quite,” he said, because he had to say something.
The last thing I had expected was happening to me. I was enjoying myself. I felt something I've never known before. It's power I feel and it's heady. Was he going to ask about the pearls? He wasn't. He couldn't quite bring himself to do it. He couldn't say, I gave her a valuable necklace because I thought I would be her lover and she would be mine for years. I didn't give it to her husband. But no, he couldn't. He would rather lose five thousand pounds or whatever the pearls are worth than expose himself to me as mean and greedy. Probably, he was brought up to think talking about money was vulgar. I should be so lucky.
“Is there anything you would like?” I said, so full of power that I had to stop myself laughing out loud.
“Perhaps this little brooch?” He picked up the china rose.
I smiled and said, “It's quite pretty, isn't it? I'll find a box to put it in.”
The box I found contained the red beads. I put the china rose inside it and, as I did so, I laid my hand for a moment on the black leather case where the pearls lie in their pink velvet bed.
Ivor Tesham thanked me too profusely. It's all terribly kind of me. He added that he knows I was a good friend to Hebe. Then power got the better of me and I said, “Because I lied for her and deceived her husband?” I laughed loudly to take the sting out of that and, after a stunned moment, he laughed too. He hadn't shaken hands with me when he arrived but he did then. I listened to his footsteps going fast, too fast, down the stairs and the front door being closed too sharply.
Did he wonder what Hebe, who was so beautiful and sexy, saw in me? Did he wonder why she called me her friend? He doesn't know how much she enjoyed having someone to patronize and show herself off against, the sparrow that no one notices when the golden oriole perches next to it.
GERRY PHONED ME and I couldn't help feeling he had only got in touch with me when he had exhausted all other possibilities. He had no one to look after Justin on Friday, so could I come? There are some people, especially men, who think others don't have to work. But considering I had been thinking I might never see him again, this was good news, so I said I would take the day off work and come. This time Justin didn't turn his back on me. He didn't tell me to go away but let me kiss him when I arrived and put his arms round my neck. And Gerry seemed pleased to see me, telling me how grateful he was for all I'd done. He could rely on me the way he couldn't on anyone else. He wished I lived nearer.
I went out into the hallway with him when he was leaving for work. Saying, “Oh, Jane, I miss her so,” he put his arms round me and hugged me. It was the first time anyone had held me like that for years. I could feel his warmth through my clothes and his heart beating. Back in the kitchen after he'd gone, I lifted Justin out of his high chair and danced about with him in my arms, singing, “Here we go gathering nuts in May, nuts in May, nuts in May …” until he shrieked with laughter.
Gerry would marry again. Why shouldn't he marry me? I was much more suited to him than Hebe had ever been. I wouldn't be unfaithful to him. Justin would soon love me as much as he'd loved her. Gerry wouldn't have hugged me like that if I hadn't begun to mean something to him. Was he beginning to see that Hebe had never been much of a wife to him, never really loved him?
As I put Justin into his buggy and prepared to walk him down to the Welsh Harp and the fields of Kingsbury Green, I realized I didn't know how to catch and keep a man. I didn't know how to begin except by being there, someone he relied on more than anyone else.
9
The trouble with being a minister, Jack Munro once said to me, is that you're an MP as well. You don't stop representing your constituents in Parliament just because you've been made an Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, or, as in Ivor's case, Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Defence. In the two years he'd been in Parliament Ivor had been a good constituency MP, holding his surgeries at fairly regular weekly intervals, accepting as many engagements in Morningford as was possible for anyone who couldn't be in two places at once, giving a sympathetic ear to the concerns of constituents. And once he became a minister he kept it up. He was ambitious; he wanted to be good and be seen to be good. But it was hard. No one pretends it isn't hard. Only the indispensable mass, the people who put you there, the electorate, haven't the faintest idea.
Ivor acquitted himself well. He sat on the government frontbench when there was room for the lowlier ministers; he spoke well and at not too great length. He attended the innumerable meetings which are a minister's lot and in July, a week before the House rose for the summer recess, flew off for two days to the Balkans to give support and comfort to our Air Power Overseas. And when the House had adjourned on a Thursday and he could leave, he drove down to Ramburgh, all prepared for his Saturday-morning surgery, for opening the flower show or the harvest festival, for speaking in the evening at the Conservatives' annual dinner or the Chamber of Commerce High Street Traders' Supper.
On August 2 Iraq invaded and overran Kuwait. U.S. forces, sup ported by troops from various European, Arab, and Asian countries, were sent to Saudi in an attempt to shield the kingdom from Iraqi assault. Although the Commons wasn't sitting, all this kept Ivor even busier than usual. The crisis deepened and made more work for him when Iraq announced on August 28 that Kuwait had become the nineteenth Iraqi governorate and extended the borders of Basra south into Kuwait, thus creating a new province. This situation, in which Ivor was closely involved, might have been thought so much bigger and more momentous than his personal problem as to make it seem petty, perhaps even to distract him from it. But we human beings aren't like that. Those things that are close to home, matters which affect our individual pride and reputation and the way we are viewed by others, those come first.
Whatever decisions he made, no matter how often and how far he traveled, he still carried his burden of stress. He was never free of worry. Dermot Lynch was always in the forefront of his mind. Those weekends when he was in Morningford and not in West minster or the Middle East he would always find an hour to come over to us at Monks Cravery. He came to talk, to unburden his soul, I suppose. We were the only people he could talk to, for although others knew some of it—Nicola Ross, for instance, knew he had had a girlfriend he never talked about and that he had known Lloyd Freeman; Hebe's
nameless friend, the “alibi lady,” knew a little more than that—we alone knew the whole thing from start to finish. The whole sorry mess, as he put it.
Nothing more had been heard of Dermot. I might say that nothing ever was heard of him; the newspapers had only mentioned him during the first couple of weeks after the accident. It wouldn't have been much of a story for them, I could see that, especially if he recovered fully and was liable to be up in court on a charge of causing death by dangerous driving. They would have to be very discreet about anything like that in the offing.
All the time Ivor knew that the thing he was worried about wasn't the thing he ought to be worried about. Hebe's death was what should have concerned him, hers and Lloyd Freeman's, but he hardly thought about their deaths. And he cared very little about Dermot's guilt or innocence in the matter of who caused the crash. He was solely troubled about the man's regaining consciousness and talking to the police. Or the press or anyone at all, come to that. And, of course, he imagined him saying, “It wasn't a real abduction. This MP called Mr. Ivor Tesham set it up as a kind of joke. Hebe Furnal was his girlfriend and he wanted her kidnapped and handcuffed and gagged and brought to his house. For her birthday. Like a game.”
Something else that constantly bothered Ivor was the gun. The handcuffs he knew about, they were part of his planned scenario, and the balaclavas and the gag and the blacked-out windows in the car, but not the gun. One of them, Dermot or Lloyd, must have brought that gun along as a bit of additional color, a surely indispensable adjunct in their Hollywood-driven ideas of what an abduction should be. The gun was a serious business; that it had been in the car at all was serious. The chance of its being connected to him made Ivor physically shiver. I saw a shiver actually run through him when he talked about it, sitting in our cottage by the log fire, for it was autumn by then and turning cold.
“I'm obsessed with Dermot Lynch,” he said. “I dream about him. I dream about him in bed in that hospital, just moving his hand and opening his eyes. Then he opens his mouth and he speaks my name. His mother's there and she says she can't hear him and to say it again. It's his mother to the life in her overall and her slippers. She sits there holding his hand and he moves his hand and she's so happy.”
I tell him he needs a drink and I'll get him one, but he says no, he's driving, and he reminds me that though he now has a government car, using it and the driver who comes with it for constituency work is forbidden. He's got to be back in Morningford by seven. All he needs now is to compound his villainy by being done for driving over the limit.
Iris says, “How do you know his mother wears an overall and slippers? You haven't ever seen her, have you?”
There was silence and then he told us. This man was in his thoughts all the time until he couldn't stand it any longer without doing something. He'd gone on the tube up to Paddington, but found when he got there that Warwick Avenue would have been the nearer station to William Cross Court in Rowley Place. He walked, aided by the London A— Z, over Brunel's bridge, through an underpass under the Westway and up into the genteel streets of Little Venice and Maida Vale. William Cross Court, built in the 1970s, had been sandwiched in between gracious stucco villas. It was a sprawling block of mustard-colored council flats with washing hung out to dry and bicycles on the balconies. Ivor might have been to Eton and Brasenose but he was an MP who'd done his canvassing along council-flat walkways. It wasn't new to him. He wasn't surprised that the hallways were covered in graffiti and the lift was out of order. He walked up to flat 23, not knowing what he was going to do when he got there.
As he came to the top of the third flight the door of number 23 opened and a woman came out. She was about sixty but startlingly like Dermot, or he was like her. That was when he saw the overall and the slippers. A parcel had been left on the step outside her front door and she had come out to pick it up. Ivor walked on past, up the fourth flight, and she didn't see him. Or she took no notice of him if she did.
“You didn't speak to her?” Iris asked.
“Of course I didn't. Of course not.”
“What was the point of going there?”
“I don't know,” Ivor said. “I know Dermot used to live there but I didn't know if his mother was living there alone or the brother lived there with her. I suppose I went there because I feel I can't go on like this. I can't but I have to, I've no choice. Since then I've found out everything I can about the family, but it doesn't exactly help. I mean, the brother's called Sean and he's some sort of builder. He's not married or anything.”
I asked what “or anything” meant.
“Cohabiting, as we politicians say,” said Ivor.
“And Dermot wasn't?”
“It appears not. They're first-generation English. Both parents came over from Ireland in the 1960s and lived first in Kilburn.”
“What's the point of knowing all this?” Iris said.
“I don't know.” Poor Ivor gave what Iris tells me 1920s novelists used to call a mirthless laugh. “There wasn't any point. I tell myself I'm interested because I ought to do something for the Lynches. Because it was my fault, if you see what I mean. Of course you see what I mean. But Lloyd Freeman's dying was just as much my fault, you could say, and I haven't done anything about him. But he had a girl-friend he'd been cohabiting with.”
“Well, don't do anything about him,” Iris said. “You've got enough on your plate with Dermot Lynch.”
“I want him not to recover. If I spell it out frankly, I want him to die. Isn't that the most appalling thing you've ever heard? Doesn't it make you want to turn me out of your house? He's done me no harm, yet I want him to die. I must be an utter shit.
“I know which hospital he's in. I know the name of the ward. I think I could bluff my way in to see him. I imagine that happening. I dream about it. I see myself sitting by his bed, waiting for him to wake up. And then I'm talking to a doctor, a consultant, and he's telling me he'll never wake up, and I'm so happy I start laughing and everyone stands around me and stares.”
So it went on. He came back next day. He'd done his red boxes, which were sent to his constituency, and he was on his way home to London.
“I meant to go over to Leicestershire,” he said, “and see Erica Caxton, but I haven't had a moment. I try to see her and the children as often as I can.” Ivor never said “kids,” though both young Caxtons were well into their teens. “I'll go next weekend.”
We had tea and he told us what it meant to be a minister. His Private Secretary was a woman called Emma, in charge of organizing his life, keeping her eye on him, and keeping him on the straight and narrow path. Iris asked him what he called her and he said “Emma” but, according to protocol, she called him “Minister.” It was the same for all his officials. However, so decreed the tribal custom, he and his Permanent Secretary exchanged Christian names. Ivor liked all this, as one does enjoy the arcane rules of a club one belongs to, rules that are incomprehensible to those outside Whitehall and the pale, which is the walls of the Palace of Westminster.
But I had the impression all the time he was talking that he valued it more than he might have done previously because he saw it as being under threat now. A word to the media about what had happened that evening in May and what hadn't happened—his going to the police, his admitting to them his part in it—would bring down all this dignity and responsibility and power. Not at once, of course. It would begin with a snide diary paragraph, be taken up next day perhaps as a few lines in an article on government sleaze. And then, after three or four days of this, would come the single-column story, the interview with him, the police comment, the few words from a “friend” in Parliament or his constituency. By the end of the week it would be on the front page, in the tabloids the lead, as the kidnap, the gun, and the two deaths reappeared in print. By then his resignation would have been asked for or he would have voluntarily resigned.
None of this was said that afternoon. We had said it all before. After he'd gone Iris asked m
e if I didn't think Ivor was “seeing rather a lot of Erica Caxton.”
“I don't know,” I said. “He's not seeing her at all today. He hasn't got time.”
“I'm not finding fault. I quite like the idea. Isn't it time he got married?”
I said she was years older than he and her husband had only been dead a few months.
“Only four years older,” Iris said. “I'm not saying anything would happen straight away, I said I like the idea. You know Mother and Dad will give up Ramburgh House to him and move into the lodge. I wouldn't mind Erica for a sister-in-law.”
That was never to happen. I mention it only because of the events that followed, or, rather, one event.
BACK IN MAY, the kidnap story had driven Sandy Caxton's murder from the front pages. But the inside pages kept it in the public mind.
Questions were asked in the House (and repeatedly in the papers) as to the guarding of former Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland. Wasn't it taken for granted that such people were protected not merely during the time they held that office but for the rest of their lives?
Since Sandy's death a series of IRA attacks had been carried out in mainland Britain and West Germany. Hooded men shot dead a young soldier and wounded his two companions as they waited for a train on Lichfield station. A bomb on the roof of the Honour able Artillery Company in London exploded, injuring seventeen civilians, most of them students at a twenty-first birthday party. Another, planted a few feet inside the doorway of the Carlton Club, haunt of Tory grandees, seriously injured a porter and wounded two others. And there were many more, including the murder of a nun in County Armagh and an explosion at the London Stock Exchange.