by Barbara Vine
I don't know what Ivor and Juliet talked about that night, though it's hard to imagine it could have been anything very different from what we'd discussed over dinner. Iris and I lay awake a long time, trying to guess what the media's next move would be. Both of us thought that, having talked to Damian Mason, they would be naturally led to Gerry Furnal; much hung on what Furnal might disclose to them. Would he say anything? He never had, but that was before the pearls and his discovery that the wife he revered had had a lover. It really depended on whether Furnal wanted to expose himself as a cuckold (to use Ivor's word) and whether in fact he'd be audacious enough to make accusations against a Minister of the Crown. Iris was positive he would. I was more doubtful. He of all the people involved in this business must know the most.
“If he'll stand up to my brother in a crowded room at a party and practically chuck his present in his face,” Iris said, “he'll have nerve enough for anything. He may want revenge. He may want more satisfaction than he got from giving back the pearls. And what's a Minister of the Crown these days? It's not the eighteenth century.”
Neither of us foresaw the direction from which discovery would come and I'm sure Ivor and Juliet didn't. Philomena Lynch perhaps or Gerry Furnal's wife, some witness to the pearls incident, or Jane Atherton's mother—we thought of all those. The pathway which led one astute investigative journalist to Ivor never crossed our imaginations. We didn't know all the people; we didn't know the host of minor characters on the perimeter. It couldn't have crossed Ivor's mind either as he lay sleepless at Juliet's side through the long watches of the night.
28
Nothing happened for a while, not for several days. The first story about Dermot Lynch had appeared on the Thursday morning, the day Ivor went to Culdrose, and we had all dined together on the Friday evening. Saturday's papers were empty of all references to Jane Atherton's murder or to Sean Lynch, and so were Sunday's—those Sunday papers, the cradles of scandal. For Ivor, waiting and dreading and hoping, it must have been rather like the days after the crash, when he waited and hoped Dermot would never regain consciousness. Worse now, though. Accumulations had happened since then. He had advanced up the ladder, he had inherited money, bought a glamorous house, acquired a beautiful fianceé, made numerous successful speeches, even come to the edge of (I repeat again my wife's quotation) “the fierce light that beats upon the high shore of the world.” It would be immeasurably worse for him now. But nothing happened. Not yet.
• • •
THE JOURNALIST WHO brought things to light was a man called David Menhellion. Iris says it's a Cornish name. In the first piece he wrote, he remarked on the fact that Juliet Case, thirty-five, fianceé of Ivor Tesham, MP for Morning-ford and a Minister of State at the Department of Defence, had once been the “live-in girlfriend” of actor Lloyd Freeman, killed in an accident to the “vehicle in which he was ‘allegedly' attempting to abduct Kelly Mason and demand a ransom from her husband, multimillionaire Damian Mason.” You can't libel the dead, of course, so Menhellion was in the clear there. Dermot was mentioned only as the driver of the kidnap car. But all this was known already. When she first became engaged to him, Juliet had herself said in an interview that she had once been married to Aaron Hunter and later had a relationship with Lloyd Freeman. She and Ivor had met through a mutual friend, the actress Nicola Ross. Very little comment had ever been made on this disclosure, but Menhellion made as much of it as he could. Had Mr. Tesham perhaps known Lloyd Freeman himself? If he had, hadn't he some questions to answer? It would be unusual, to say the least, ought to be impossible, for a member of the government to have a friendship with a kidnapper and one who was very likely also the author of demands for money with menaces made to Mr. Mason.
When I'd read this through twice I thought that on the whole it was pretty thin. It was scandal-sheet stuff. A rational reader would soon see that Ivor might well have known Lloyd Freeman as an actor only and have first encountered him in Juliet's company. Nor did it much worry Ivor.
“All that's already in the public domain,” was the way he put it, in the politician-speak he used when he was disturbed.
Next day, though, none of us could remain unconcerned. Menhellion's story, a lead in a tabloid, looked at first like a simple follow-up of the previous day's delving into Juliet's past. There was nothing new in the first three paragraphs. Then he asked his first rhetorical question: what was Ivor Tesham, Minister of State at the Defence Department, doing while his present-day fianceé was sharing her Queen's Park “apartment” with her live-in lover Lloyd Freeman? Involved, Menhellion said, in a “steamy” love affair with none other than Hebe Furnal, twenty-seven. Hebe had died in the kidnap car crash along with Lloyd Freeman.
I spoke to Ivor on the phone ten minutes after I read that. He was calm but very quiet.
“We've already had them phoning,” he said.
“What, journalists?”
“Someone called. I mean, not the American ‘called,' came to the door. I slammed the door on him.”
“Will you go in?”
“To the department? Yes, of course. I must. Look, can Juliet come up to you? I don't want to leave her alone here. They're bound to come. That's for sure. I could get her out the back way before I have to go.”
I had an appointment. I was due to pay another visit to that client in Blomfield Road, Maida Vale. The last time I'd been there was when I saw Ivor and Juliet heading for Warwick Avenue tube station after they'd been to see the Lynches in William Cross Court. They should never have gone near the place but I wouldn't allow myself, even to myself, to say I told you so.
Juliet spent the day with Iris and the children and was still there when I got home. She'd spoken to Ivor several times on the phone, but the last time she'd tried he was in the House of Commons with his mobile switched off. I'd brought the evening paper in with me and, as we'd all expected, they were carrying a portrait photograph of Hebe and the windblown one of her with Justin, both of them alongside Juliet in extravagant eighteenth-century comedy clothes. She looked about twenty.
I asked her where they got that from.
“I had a part in The School for Scandal. Apt, isn't it? I'd guess Aaron gave it to them.”
“Would he do that? I thought you and he were on good terms.”
“He hates this government. It's not Ivor in particular. He'd do the same if it was anyone in the government. It's all part of this antisleaze campaign of his.”
There had been nothing about Juliet's marriage to Hunter in the morning papers but there was by the evening. Apparently with enthusiasm, he had given them an interview as well as the photograph. Yes, he knew Ivor Tesham, he'd met him on several occasions. Lloyd Freeman too. He wasn't prepared to say (he said) that he and Juliet had been divorced on Freeman's account, there were many factors that led to their breakup, but Freeman had certainly “appeared on the scene” very soon after their decree became absolute. He had moved in with her at her home in Queen's Park. Whether they were still together when the kidnap attempt was made in May 1990, he wouldn't care to say.
A double-page spread, sprinkled with photographs, was devoted to a biography of Hebe. As is usually the way with beautiful women, she had often had her picture taken. There was a wedding photograph, Hebe in clouds of white clinging to Gerry Furnal's arm. There was a postnatal photograph, Hebe in bed with her baby in her arms, and another of her in a black dress with pearls.
“The pearls, I suppose,” Iris said. “Surely Gerry Furnal didn't give them those pictures. Surely he wouldn't, not her husband.”
“Come to that, who gave them the story? Who told them all that stuff?”
I drove Juliet home at about six. I was crawling slowly along through Westminster when we saw the crowd ahead of us. It was their spilling over into Marsham Street that was causing the traffic holdup. We passed Ivor's house, necessarily slowly, and Juliet turned her head to look at them, the press pack, the media with movie cameras, the photographers. The house faced dire
ctly onto the street, with short pillars linked by a chain rather than a front garden separating it from the roadway. The reporters were inside the chain, pressed against the front wall and downstairs windows. They left only half the roadway accessible to traffic and one of them was sitting on top of a van illicitly standing on the yellow line.
“I can't go in there, Rob,” Juliet said in an unnaturally high voice.
I turned down the next street on the left, came out onto Millbank and found a place to park on the Embankment. She would have to come back with me, I said, and we'd better get hold of Ivor too. Would he be there for the evening vote? She said she was sure he would be. In the bar, probably. Her gentle, loving tone took away any sting there might have been.
“It must have been like this for Gerry Furnal,” she said, “before they thought it was Kelly Mason that Lloyd and Der-mot were after. I mean, the media outside like that, persecuting him.”
She had a mobile phone with her and from the car she called the Commons and left a message for Ivor to phone her urgently. He phoned and he turned up at our house at about eight, having taken a taxi all the way. The children, especially Nadine, enjoy having people to stay and were all over Juliet. Much as I love my daughter and my sons, I know this kind of attention can be irritating when you're anxious about something quite other, but Juliet was perfect. She behaved with them as if there was nothing she would like better than conversing with them to the exclusion of everyone else until bedtime came. Nadine insisted on taking her upstairs to see the bedroom where she and Ivor would sleep, instructing her in things she undoubtedly already knew, like how to turn on the bed lamps and which tap the hot water came out of.
Ivor and I went into the study, taking our drinks and the bottle with us. It's not really a study, at least in the sense that Iris and I do any studying in it or any work at all, but it's a quiet haven with appropriate leather armchairs and a desk of sorts, and the children aren't allowed beyond the doorway.
“No one's said a word to me in the House.”
“It's been more about Juliet than you,” I said. “It's been more about Hebe.”
“So far. My biography will start tomorrow. We'll have to go home; there's no escape. We'll just brave those people and that's all there is to it.”
“Just out of interest, why did you get to know the Lynches? You've never really told me.”
“Dermot—he was on my conscience. As soon as I knew he was going to survive. You didn't think I'd got a conscience, did you, Rob?”
That's not the sort of question I ever answer. “Now tell me why really?”
He laughed. It wasn't much of a laugh, more a dry sort of barking sound. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he smiled. “I wanted to know what sort of a state he was in, whether he could ever tell the police that I was the ‘mastermind' they were looking for. By the time I knew he couldn't I'd met Sean and his old mum, I was going to give them money and it was too fucking late.”
“There was a bit of conscience in it, then,” I said.
At that point he said something which may have been original, though it sounded like a quote: “When a politician becomes ‘the story' he's no longer any use in politics.”
IVOR ORDERED a taxi and the two of them went back to Glanvill Street at six in the morning. The press weren't there but they had turned up by seven. They mobbed Ivor when at last he came out and made Juliet cry when she appeared at a window. She thought they were going to break the window, but they didn't; they took photographs of her through the glass.
Our morning paper came after Ivor and Juliet had gone. Not Gerry Furnal but Philomena Lynch and Sheila Atherton had both given interviews. Neither mentioned the kidnap attempt. The art less Mrs. Lynch, poor woman, mother of a probable criminal and murderer and of a disabled wreck of a man, all of which the paper exploited, said how Mr. Tesham had been a friend of her son Dermot. When Mr. Tesham heard that Dermot was “a cripple” he'd come to see them with his fianceé, Miss Case, and offered Dermot a pension, which he'd been paying ever since. He was such a generous man and very good and kind, with no side to him. As for Miss Case, she was a lovely girl.
Sheila Atherton said that her daughter, the murdered girl, had worked as a children's nanny to Mr. Gerald Furnal because he had lost his wife and needed someone to look after his small son, Justin. His wife, Hebe, had been a “very close friend” of Jane's. They had been at university together. She had died in a car crash. Yes, she thought it was the car crash that took place somewhere in London on May 18, 1990, and she thought the driver was killed. But it may have been the other man who was in the car. “A colored man,” she called Lloyd, and I was surprised the newspaper printed those words.
If you scrutinized this as Iris and I did, you could see that the link between Ivor and all this was that he had taken up with Juliet Case after her ex-boyfriend Lloyd Freeman was dead and that he had paid an allowance (a sort of disability pension) to the driver of a crash car in which Lloyd Freeman had been a passenger. Did the media even know what they were looking for?
They kept it up through the Wednesday, mostly with repetition and a plethora of photographs. Ivor went into the department by day and into the House of Commons to vote. In the past he'd always walked to work and back, but that had become impossible. Thanks to the photographs, people recognized him; cameramen followed him, anxious for more shots to use next day, leaving enough of their number behind to catch Juliet if she dared emerge. Braving them was a frightening thing, because they crowded Juliet, thrusting their cameras into her face. Her being so beautiful and eminently photogenic didn't help. I suppose she hadn't been much of an actress or hadn't had the right agent, because surely if she had she would have somehow found her way to Hollywood. Perhaps she was just so nice and, oddly, so modest. Every photograph of her which appeared made her look perfect. There was no awkwardness in any of them, no lines of strain or moue of anger. In a single one she seemed distressed and had tears on her face and in that she looked only like the Tragic Muse.
But why did they persist? Why did they keep the story going? Nothing new came out and two days went by. Iris said she thought that perhaps they were working on someone, persuading someone to say more, to confirm what they knew but dared not divulge without confirmation.
ON THE FRIDAY afternoon Ivor drove himself and Juliet to Ramburgh. It was a brave thing to do, first pushing through the reporters and photographers to get to the car. He told me afterward that getting Juliet through was the hardest part.
He thought for a while, then, “No,” he said, “the hardest fucking part was not giving that Sun guy a sock on the jaw. Lovely expression that, don't you think? Does anyone say it anymore?”
I said it was a very good thing he hadn't and felt like a prig. Braver, though, was facing his constituents in Morning-ford and this he did on Saturday. He held his surgery as usual. Someone asked him why he was paying a pension to a man whose injuries happened through his own careless driving. It wasn't the sort of question constituents should ask when they came to their MP for help, but Ivor answered it or, rather, he said that no charge had ever been brought against Dermot Lynch, so it was impossible to say if his driving had been careless or not. By that time he had seen Saturday's newspapers, or one of them, the relevant one.
It had a scoop. On its front page was an interview with a woman who called herself a friend of Hebe Furnal's but who wished to remain anonymous.
I say he had seen the newspaper but he hadn't read the story in the sense of perusing it. The paper, which was regularly delivered to Ramburgh House, where my mother-in-law was, of course, living, was The Times, but the one which had scooped the rest Ivor picked up after he'd parked his car in the Market Square of Morningford. He saw the headline, the picture of Hebe, and he read the first line of one of the paragraphs in her account of things. Then his agent came down the steps to greet him and he had to run the gauntlet of the people waiting to see him.
Presumably, Gerry Furnal had refused to s
peak to them and so had his wife, Pandora. When I saw the paper and read the story, I found myself hoping against hope (in soppy-father mode) that Hebe's son, Justin, was too young to understand any of it and that no one would ever tell him of it.
Ivor went back to Ramburgh House. He had no local engagement that evening and none on the Sunday. Going home to London on the Sunday morning was an option and he decided to take it. By then he had read the anonymous woman's interview with a journalist twice while sitting in his car, parked in a farm gateway on a quiet stretch of lane. Much of what she said was untrue or, at best, half true. She talked of Hebe's promiscuity, her spending of her hardworking husband's money on “other men.” Hebe had neglected her child, she said, in order to meet her lover “two or three times a week” and had often not returned home until “the small hours.” He had given her a pearl necklace worth seven thousand pounds, which she had told her husband came from the British Home Stores. Ivor's name wasn't mentioned—the anonymous woman didn't know it—only that Hebe's lover was “an important man in government,” which, at that time, he was not. Ivor read the interview a third time. When he came once more to the bit about how he was supposed to have met Hebe so often he said aloud, “I should have been so lucky.”
It was a fine sunny day, warm for October. He could see the fields, not yet plowed, white with chamomile flowers where the barley had been. I'm not saying this to add color to my narrative. This is the way he described things as he sat there reading and rereading that paper.
He didn't show it to Juliet or his mother. He was an English gentleman, enough of the old school in spite of his outré sexual carryings-on, to feel it right to keep unpleasant things from women if he could. Of course they must know it and know it soon, but not yet, not on this glorious day. He ate his lunch, not drinking too much till the evening. He and Juliet went for a walk, through the grounds of Ramburgh House, across the fields to the river and back by the lanes and the village. I know it well; Iris and I have done it many times.