The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  Ivor came to see the baby but was too busy in the then busiest of government departments to stay long. And after that our troubles began at home. Nadine, who had been the sweetest child, the most loving and, in the best possible way, the most precocious, reverted to crawling and refusing food. It was rather uncanny to hear her new manner of crying, not the strong ear-splitting crying of an eighteen-month-old but the soft mewling of an infant. We didn't need a child psychologist to tell us she was jealous of her new brother. Pathetically, this was her way of trying to win us back, by emulating his behavior, which she must have assumed pleased us more than her more mature ways.

  “Maybe we shouldn't have had another child,” Iris said, worn out as she was by two yelling, demanding infants.

  Too late now, I said, attempting robustness. “It'll be all right. It'll work out, because if it doesn't everyone would be an only child.”

  It did, but it took several months before Nadine accepted her brother and a couple more before she grew to love him with a fierce protectiveness. During that time, though I went to work, of course I did, we stayed at home, afraid to leave the children with a babysitter, afraid to leave them even with my mother. And we made it clear we wanted no visitors. All our attention was needed by Nadine and Adam. So our only contact with Ivor was the occasional phone call and, of course, what we read about him in the newspaper. And throughout that year we met seldom. He told us that he hardly went out. His evenings as well as his days were occupied with the Gulf War and the continuing efforts of the IRA. He tried to maintain his friendship with Erica Caxton and any other free time he got he spent with Juliet Case.

  In the following year he knew he would have an election to fight. As you know, we've a system in this country that other nations find curious, that of not announcing the date of a general election until twenty-one days before it takes place. Everyone knows this election is going to happen and approximately when it will happen, but the date is only disclosed three weeks beforehand. That year, 1992, the Labour Party expected to defeat the government, and the existing administration feared they were right. But they were wrong and in April John Major's Conservatives were returned with a rather dodgy majority of twenty-one. Ivor got back in in Morningford, his own majority slightly reduced. He had worked hard to get himself returned, faced as he had been with the almost superhuman task of fighting a strong Labour candidate in his own constituency while attending to his departmental work in Westminster. Up in a Midlands constituency Aaron Hunter, standing as an Independent on an antisleaze ticket, failed to unseat the Tory member.

  “Not surprising, since no Independent has sat in the Commons for almost fifty years,” said Ivor.

  It was a long time before we met Juliet, but it happened at last. As Iris said to me, being called Juliet must confer on its bearer the obligation to be sweet and romantic and is therefore something of a liability. But this Juliet can have had no worries on that score. Sweet she was and beautiful in unexpected ways. I say unexpected, because I believed Ivor had a type, the tall slender blonde, into which category Nicola Ross came and Hebe Furnal, of course, had come. Juliet Case I have already described. I have quoted Ivor's accolade. But even Ivor failed to convey her warmth, her sweetness, and that rare quality, the mastery of keeping silent. She was kind too. I never heard her say an unpleasant thing about anyone. To look at her, voluptuous, dark, with the velvety white skin of the Iberian type, the ready smile, the deep brown eyes that seemed always to be seeing happy visions, you would have expected her to be talkative, loquacious, readily laughing. But she was a mistress of tranquillity. When she had nothing to say she said nothing. I once heard Ivor address her as “my gracious silence,” which, Iris tells me, is what Coriolanus calls his wife. Listener as she was, you respected all the more her utterances when she did speak.

  We had all met at our house before going out to dinner, leaving my mother with the children. We went to a restaurant in Hampstead, in Heath Street, because Iris was nervous about going too far away, though Adam was fifteen months old by then and Nadine getting on for three. Iris and I had noticed that, although it wasn't the precise anniversary, this was the week, two years ago, of the crash in which Hebe had died. We had noticed but there was no sign that either of the others had. Perhaps they had and it was only discretion that stopped them mentioning it. Hebe wasn't, after all, the only one who had died. Juliet's ex-boyfriend Lloyd Freeman had also been killed. And I wondered a lot about that. I had talked to Iris about it and found she had wondered too. Wasn't it rather strange of Juliet to be going about with Ivor when she knew he was responsible for, if not causing the accident, organizing the setup that led to it?

  “He seems to have been her ex-boyfriend by that time,” Iris said. “Perhaps she hadn't much feeling left for him.”

  I said I found that rather hard to swallow. When you think about that sort of thing you have to put yourself in the other person's shoes, as far as you can, and imagine how you would feel. I put myself into the shoes of a male version of Juliet and pictured hearing about the death in an accident of the girl I'd been going about with just before Iris and I met, and I thought, notwithstanding falling in love with Iris at first sight, how upset I'd have been, how shocked, how determined to have nothing to do with the man—but no, it didn't work. Sophie couldn't drive, wouldn't have taken part in a mock kidnap; the whole thing fell to the ground, as my fantasies usually do. But in spite of my failure to imagine Juliet's feelings, I was left with the conviction that her behavior was odd, that perhaps she had some ulterior purpose in going about with Ivor. I'm afraid too—and I'm not proud of this—that I rather flinched from a woman who would sleep with a man the first time she went out with him.

  At that dinner we talked about his election success. Juliet mentioned her former husband Aaron Hunter's defeat by an MP Ivor knew quite well called Martin Reed. That was when Ivor made that remark about no Independent having sat in Parliament for nearly half a century. We talked about that, Juliet exhibiting as much calm indifference to the fate of Hunter as she seemed to be doing to that of Lloyd Freeman. She smiled, she maintained quietness. When she spoke she was witty and amusing, and this had something to do with the contrast between this and her silences. Iris asked her if she was acting at present and she said she wasn't, she said she hadn't had a part in anything for several years.

  “Luckily I've got a little money of my own to live on,” she said.

  Later on we asked each other if that “little money” came from Ivor. We both watched her with great interest and we watched the way she looked at Ivor and he at her. She was dressed in black, short-skirted to show off the legs—the feet in stilt heels—low-necked to display the fine bosom. A thin red stole, embroidered in black, rested on her shoulders. His glances at her were almost wolfish, while she sat in calm repose. One day, I said to Iris on the way home, she will be vastly fat and she won't care.

  “She ate an awful lot,” Iris said. “You don't often see women eating like that. I don't mean she hasn't got perfectly good table manners, I don't mean that at all, but she eats with a kind of concentration. She shovels it in almost delicately but she does shovel it.”

  I laughed. We let ourselves into the house. My mother said with proud satisfaction that both children had enjoyed unbroken sleep all the time we were out.

  IVOR HAD NEVER lived with a woman. There had been times he seemed to be on the point of doing so, such as when he was having his affair with Deborah Liston and he spoke to us of her “thinking of moving in.” Almost immediately after that he met Nicola Ross and that was the end of Deborah and her move. Nicola, apparently, suggested he come and live with her. She had no intention of leaving her house by the river at Hammersmith, but Ivor wouldn't do it. I believe he thought there was something diminishing of his manhood in sharing a woman's home. Or perhaps he just didn't care for her enough to set up house with her. As for Hebe, he and I had, of course, once been into the possibility of his buying her a Pimlico flat, but the point of that was to a
void his having to live with her while being free to visit her whenever he chose.

  Would he break his rule, if rule it was, for Juliet? It didn't look like it, yet he seemed to spend every free moment he had with her. He had driven her down to Ramburgh to meet his parents and their enthusiasm seemed, if anything, to increase his feelings for her. Was that love, passion, or sex alone? I don't know. That is, I didn't know then. Ivor and she went to a fellow MP's wedding in York and got their picture in the papers along with the bride and groom, Juliet in a black lace cartwheel hat and a white linen dress. The local daily, the Morningford Gazette, carried a photograph of them at the Norfolk Show just after Ivor went up another rung of the ladder and was made a Minister of State. Iris and I asked each other if her parents had said any more about moving out of Ramburgh House when Ivor got married.

  “If he is going to get married,” Iris said, “I'd rather it had been Erica Caxton.”

  I said I thought she liked Juliet.

  “Well, I do. But that doesn't mean I want her for a sister-in-law. I don't know why, but I think she'd be unfaithful.”

  “That would make two of them,” I said, for I couldn't imagine Ivor being with one woman, wife or not, for long.

  ON THE FACE of it, so many things had been forgotten. On the rare occasions when we saw Ivor alone he would sometimes refer to the accident, even mention Hebe in a rueful sort of way. Poor dead Lloyd also received a little of his attention, as once, for instance, he spoke of the first time he had seen Juliet, at Nicola Ross's party. He even said he regretted asking Lloyd to take part in his kidnap scenario. Lloyd had been a promising actor, he thought, and so young. It had been such a waste of talent and of life itself. But of Gerry Furnal and Hebe's child he never spoke. They might not have existed as far as he was concerned. The alibi lady he also seemed to have expunged from his memory. As for the Lynches, the absolute dread he had once had of them, his horror of Sean Lynch and not even hidden wish for Dermot to die, all that had gone, might never have been. The possibility of compensating them for Dermot's injuries also seemed forgotten. Or so it appeared that summer and autumn.

  Iris and I had at last decided we must move. The Hampstead mews house, which had been her parents' wedding present to us, was too small for a couple with two children of opposite sexes. It would really have been too small for a couple with children of the same sex. The second bedroom was very small. There was room in it for Nadine's narrow bed and Adam's cot and that was all—no clothes cupboard, no chest of drawers. We had put it on the market in the summer. In September, on the day that came to be known as Black Wednesday, the government—Ivor's government— was forced to withdraw the pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Among other currency disasters, the housing market crashed. How we came to sell our house at all I don't know, but we did, and were lucky to sell it a month later. But I received less for it than my father-in-law had paid six years before.

  Ivor had visited us in that house many times and had brought Juliet there more than once. I used to expect him to show some sign that he recalled, surely unpleasantly if not painfully, the evening he had spent there, waiting for Hebe to come. An involuntary wince perhaps, a hesitation before he crossed our threshold, even a silent glance around our living room as he thought of that wait and of his ignorance at the time as to what was really taking place. But none of that happened. It may be that he was determined it should not and so he exercised an iron control over his features and his eyes. He was good at iron control, was Ivor.

  So we moved out in November and into the new house we had bought on a bigger mortgage than I had hoped for in the far north of London, on the Hertfordshire border. With his elitist ideas and English gentleman's notions of the only place to live as being in something two centuries old in the country or the heart of town, Ivor looked tolerantly at our 1960s red brick, our double garage, and our half-acre of garden. “Just the thing,” he said, “if you have children.” He reminded me of a story told me by a banker I know. This man, whose name was Jonathan, bought a house in South Kensington and took his father to see it. While approving up to a point, the old man said to Jonathan, “Very nice, my boy. And where will you have your town house?”

  Ivor was taking Juliet to Nice for a few days. It would be the first real holiday he had had for nearly three years. Before he went he drove up to Leicestershire one Sunday to see Erica and her children and on his way home he called on us. Although she knew all about it, and I knew she did, I never liked to mention anything about the crash in Juliet's presence. For one thing, I wouldn't have cared to speak of Lloyd in front of her and it would have been difficult to avoid speaking of him. But now we had Ivor to ourselves and he had got on to the subject of Erica, how she seemed at last to be recovering from the loss of Sandy, digressing only a little to talk about the latest IRA atrocity, I asked him if he ever had any news of the Lynch family, particularly of Der-mot Lynch.

  “Why would I?” he said. “You always went on and on about how I ought to be careful never to go near any of them.”

  15

  I have been keeping this scrapbook since the time when Hebe died. It is a companion book to the diary, which isn't a book at all. When I came to Irving Road I brought both with me. Ivor Tesham is its subject and that includes a lot of peripheral stuff, pictures of the accident, for instance, photographs of all the people involved. After all, I have to do something more than look after Justin and cook evening meals for Gerry. I have to have a hobby and keeping cuttings about a really famous celebrity wouldn't be all that interesting. There would be too many of them. I'd reach a point of having to pick and choose, of selecting which to keep and which to discard. The choice I've made is perfect. Ivor Tesham is well enough known to get his name in the newspapers perhaps once every two or three weeks but no more and his photograph far less often. I confine my searches to the Guardian, which is delivered here every day, and to the Evening Standard, which Gerry brings home with him and which I carry away upstairs to my room when he has finished with it.

  No one else knows about the scrapbook. But when you come to think of it, who is there who could know? I don't really know anyone except Gerry and my mother and the girls. Grania, I mean, and Lucy and Wendy. And of course I know Gerry's mother and my tenant, Pandora Flint. That's quite a respectable list of friends, isn't it? Except that none of them are my friends. I thought Gerry would be. I hoped Gerry and I would grow closer as time went on, but we haven't really. We did for a while, when he talked to me about Hebe, how he missed her and how wonderful she was, and I listened and said yes and no and of course. But that didn't go on for long. It went on for months and then it stopped. Instead of talking about something else he just stopped talking. This was partly because Justin started staying up later. He wouldn't go to sleep at six—he got into the way of wanting someone to sit with him—so Gerry let him stay up till eight. I don't agree with it. I think children need their sleep and grown-ups certainly need a bit of peace. Gerry says he never gets a chance to talk to his son unless he lets him stay up later and, of course, he is the boss, he makes the rules. As for me, I talk about Callum less than I did. Maybe Gerry doesn't believe in him anymore. A real boyfriend would phone, wouldn't he? He'd call for me. And there's another difficulty. If you have an imaginary friend—because, let's face it, that's what Callum is—you always know he's imaginary unless you're mad, and you lose interest in him, you forget to talk about him, and worse, you forget what you said about him before. Gerry looked suspicious when I said Callum was thirty-one and I realized I'd taken a year off the age he was a year ago. He asked me if I was sure of that when I said he lived in Kensington.

  But to get back to the scrapbook and Ivor Tesham. Or, rather, to get back to Ivor Tesham. The scrapbook can look after itself, it's locked in a safe-deposit box in my tiny cell, and it's not even very interesting, just a man's political life in journalese and illustrations. But it's his private life as well. There are several photographs of him with his new love, his bosomy girlfr
iend who rejoices in the unlikely name of Juliet Case and calls herself an actress, though what she has acted in is a mystery to me and, I suspect, to everyone else. Tesham didn't wait long. He wasn't faithful to Hebe's memory for more than a few months. I sometimes wonder—no, I often wonder—what Gerry would think if he knew there was a man out there in the world, a man also in London, though in a rather different part of it from this dump, a man who was Hebe's lover but who forgot her once she was dead.

  Juliet Case is also a bit different. From Hebe, I mean. At any rate, whatever else she may have been, Hebe was beautiful, ethereal-looking, delicate, fair as a lily (as Gerry often says), while this woman looks as if she ought to be at a bullfight with a rose between her teeth. Carmen, no less. I wonder too how much she knows about that Friday evening, about the crash, if she knows anything. I have thought about it to the point of exhaustion. The cuttings that half fill the scrapbook have given me some help. I have read and reread the pieces that describe the crash and looked again and again at the photographs. A few days after it happened and when the police thought Kelly Mason was the intended victim, they were looking for the man who was behind it all, the man who organized it and set it up. Then we heard no more about it till last week, when an article appeared that resurrected the whole thing and said the police were still looking for this mastermind. It is over two years in the past but they are still looking.

  The article didn't name this man. It named Lloyd Freeman and Dermot Lynch and it said Lynch was a motor mechanic who serviced MPs' cars. Ivor Tesham doesn't just have a government car; he has one of his own, a big BMW. One of the photographs in the scrapbook shows him getting into this car outside his flat in Westminster. Suppose Dermot Lynch used to service this car? It's very likely. The conclusion I drew from working this out made me feel very excited. It could mean that the only person in the world who knew both Lloyd Freeman and Dermot Lynch was Ivor Tesham. He was the mastermind.