The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  Sometime that evening, in preparation for his departure next day, he must have gone into the room next to the boot room at the back of the house and fetched what he needed to take back to London with him in the morning.

  WHILE IVOR WAS sitting in his car on the way back from Morningford, Sheila Atherton, Jane's mother, was in her daughter's flat, where she found Jane's diary under the floorboards. I know it was at the precise time, or at any rate on the precise morning, because she told Juliet the date and the time of her discovery when she sent her a copy. She had been walking about the one-room flat when she noticed how a floorboard creaked as she crossed a certain point. Jane's flat wasn't carpeted but scattered with rugs. She moved one of these rugs, lifted a loose floorboard and found the diary, sheets of A4 paper clipped together.

  If they ever knew about it, the press must have longed to get hold of the diary. They never did. Sheila Atherton handed it to the police, though not apparently for quite some time. After all, they had Jane's murderer in custody, which must have been the result of what she told them Jane told her about him and his attack on her. Why did she send the copy she made of the diary not to Ivor, but to Juliet? Malice? Revenge? I don't know. You will have seen by now Jane's hatred of Ivor and contempt for him and also the light it sheds on so many dark corners and imponderables. It was because she sent it to Juliet that I have been able to include it, or parts of it, in this account, having first secured Mrs. Atherton's permission as holder of the copyright.

  What happened to Hebe's clothes? Those presumably sexy, lap-dancer's, embarrassing clothes that poor Jane put on to see how she might entice the window cleaner. Was she wearing them when Sean Lynch made his way in? Perhaps her mother found them in the suitcase in the cupboard and threw them away out of shame.

  29

  Menhellion had cleverly never mentioned Sean Lynch, yet his name seemed to underlie every line. It was all there too, in an experienced journalist's synopsis. We left it to Ivor to get in touch with us, or we did so until the Sunday evening and we had heard nothing. At about seven he phoned us and, hastily getting hold of a babysitter, paying her double time, I drove us to Westminster.

  His mother and Juliet had done what he asked and Ivor was alone. He'd aged ten years. His hair hadn't turned white overnight because, contrary to popular belief, that doesn't happen, but there seemed more gray in it than when I'd last seen him. He'd eaten nothing since he left Ramburgh at nine that morning but he'd put away a good deal of whisky and had moved on to red wine. Iris found the fridge well stocked with food by prudent Juliet and she made us sandwiches.

  “Someone will ask a question in the House tomorrow,” Ivor said.

  “And you'll be there?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion. “It'll be that cliché about ‘we who are about to die salute thee' crap. I wonder why those poor old Christians bothered to say that. I wouldn't if I were about to be eaten by a lion. I'd tell the emperor to fuck off.”

  “D'you think you'll be eaten?”

  “Of course. It's the end of me, Rob. I've become the story. No secretaryship of state now. I'll never get into the Cabinet. No re-election. They won't like this in Morningford.”

  I asked where Juliet was and he told us she'd stayed behind in Ramburgh. “I considered just breaking things off with her, you know. Tell her it wasn't working out. It's been nice knowing you and please keep the ring.”

  “You wouldn't do that,” Iris said, aghast.

  “Well, I didn't. I only said I'd considered it.”

  We ate the sandwiches, or Iris and I did. Ivor took one but didn't eat it. He opened another bottle of Burgundy and said he'd probably have a hangover in the morning.

  “But that may be no bad thing. It will distract me.”

  The expensive babysitter phoned then and said Adam was crying and complaining of pains in his stomach, so we had to go. We left at once, Iris already overanxious. There was nothing wrong with Adam. He shut up when he saw us, so I suppose it was a ploy to fetch us home. But I wished we could have stayed longer with Ivor. I hated leaving him alone. He shook hands with me and kissed Iris, which were most unusual actions, but he was already half drunk and I thought that must account for it.

  We didn't sleep much, either of us. After trying to get to sleep, I went downstairs and picked up a book I'd been reading all day, on and off, in an effort to distract myself from Ivor's troubles. I have often thought about English gentlemen in literature and the recourse to which certain authors drive them, and here in this Dorothy L. Sayers novel was a classic example of the very thing. It was The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and toward the end Dr. Penberthy faces disgrace, a trial and, in those days, execution. I'm going to quote from it because it was extraordinarily apt, though of course I didn't know that at the time.

  “Dr. Penberthy,” said the old man, “now that that paper is in Lord Peter Wimsey's hands, you understand that he can only take the course of communicating with the police. But as that would cause a great deal of unpleasantness to yourself and to other people, you may wish to take another way out of the situation … If not—”

  He drew out from his jacket pocket the thing which he had fetched.

  “If not, I happen to have brought this with me from my private locker. I am placing it here, in the table drawer, preparatory to taking it down to the country tomorrow. It is loaded.”

  “Thank you,” said Penberthy.

  I finished the book, which, by the way, was what people who know about such things call “a good read,” and went back upstairs. Iris was still not asleep; a wakeful child—it was Adam—had joined her and very pretty they looked with their arms round each other. It was ten past four. I carried Adam back to his bed. Should we phone Ivor in the morning, I asked Iris, or would a call from us just be a nuisance to him? When someone close to you is in the sort of trouble he was in, you don't want to let him feel isolated or feel that you don't care. We phoned. He said he'd slept a bit, more than he'd expected, and the strange thing was he'd woken up feeling quite fresh and calm, not a trace of a hangover.

  “I won't drink before I go into the chamber. I'll have a drink afterward.”

  “Is it certain it's going to happen?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “As luck will have it, I have a statement to make and once I've made it, while I'm still at the dispatch box, some Opposition backbencher will ask me if there's any truth in the Menhellion story. It goes without saying. That is what will happen.”

  I asked him what he'd say.

  “Christ knows. Well, I suppose I do know. I'll tell the truth. I have to. I'm not getting into that sort of shit, lying to the House of Commons. I'll tell the truth, but it won't necessarily be the whole truth.”

  “Will the whole truth have to come out?”

  “You know, Rob, I don't think it will. I really don't think it ever will.”

  That should have alerted me, that should have rung an alarm, but it didn't. I listened to the Today program on Radio Four. It devoted a full five minutes to the Lynches, the Furnals, and Jane Atherton, with an aside that Ivor Tesham, the Air Power Overseas Minister, would have some explaining to do and that, though invited, he had been unwilling to come on the program. I listened to all that and then I went to work. When I got there I read a selection of the morning papers. They were full of follow-up stories, including life histories of the Lynch family and Sheila Atherton's account of her dead daughter's school and university days, a boy friend called Callum and another who was the son of a wealthy glass manufacturer. Gerry Furnal maintained his dignified silence. What the point was in showing a large photograph of his new baby, I have no idea. I suppose Pandora, silent and otherwise reserved, gave it to the newspaper with pride.

  • • •

  I COULD EASILY have found out exactly what happened in the Commons that day but I didn't. By the time the paper came next day I couldn't bear any more. Did Ivor have notice of the question the Labour backbencher Mark Saddler intended to ask
him? Do they have to table a question like that or can they just get up and ask it? I don't know. But I do know what Ivor said, because it was headlines. It was on television and radio; it was everywhere.

  Saddler was a notorious anti-royalist and well known for his derisive wit. At each State Opening of Parliament, when Black Rod summoned the Commons “to attend Her Majesty in the House of Peers,” he regularly shouted out some ribald comment, insulting the Queen over her expenditure or the conduct of her children. He was notorious as a troublemaker and an enfant terrible.

  It must have been known by the afternoon that something exciting and probably of political significance was about to happen. The House was packed, no room left on those ribbed green leather benches. After Ivor had read his statement—something pedestrian about the cost of an episode in the Balkan wars—Saddler got up and asked him if he had anything to say about the implications of a report in The Times of that morning. I suppose everyone thought Ivor would prevaricate, bluster perhaps, or say he had no comment to make. He did neither.

  The dispatch boxes in the Commons are of polished wood with dull brass fittings. Slightly to the right of them, on the table, lies the mace, symbol of royal authority. On his feet at the dispatch box, he said, “The honorable gentleman is quite right to ask this question. The allegations are true. Certain details are incorrect but the account of what I did is substantially true. Hebe Furnal was my mistress. I did arrange her abduction, though not against her will. I am paying a pension to the driver of the car, Dermot Lynch, brother of Sean Lynch, at present on remand for the alleged murder of Jane Atherton.”

  What happens in Parliament being privileged, Ivor could mention Sean Lynch with impunity. A gasp had gone up (according to the newspaper) from all sides of the House. It turned into a roar like that of hounds baying in pursuit of some hunted creature. But Ivor was no fox or hare and, in his peculiar way, I think he must have enjoyed it. Perhaps, then, he knew the answer to why those Christians gave their humble yet defiant salutation to the emperor. I imagine he looked round at the benches, at the ranked faces, the yelling mouths, with the same kind of panache. Then he sat down. I suppose there was some discussion, more questions perhaps, but when the Speaker moved on to the next business he walked out. His departure met with utter silence.

  He walked home. It wasn't very far. According to his cleaner, who had left about an hour before, not a single reporter or photo grapher had been outside since Ivor had left for the House at lunchtime. They would be back, of course, in greater numbers than ever now, but when Ivor let himself into his house, none of them was there. The action was all happening inside the Palace of Westminster.

  I wasn't there either. I was in my office in the City, unable to concentrate on anything much, wondering if the question Ivor had predicted would be asked, wondering what he'd say. Iris was at home with the children, or, rather, fetching Nadine from infant school, with one little boy on foot and the other in the pushchair. At Ramburgh House, Juliet was keeping my mother-in-law company.

  Because we weren't there, I don't really know what happened, but there are things one can deduce. I'd say that the first thing Ivor did was take from his desk drawer the will he had made the previous week. Juliet told me later that he had had an appointment with his solicitor on the Friday, on the morning of the day they drove to Ramburgh. This will, correctly signed and witnessed, he left on top of his desk, making sure it was the only item there. After that, he drank some whisky from a bottle of Jack Daniel's. I don't know why he drank Jack Daniel's. He once told me he didn't like it, he preferred Scotch, but perhaps that was all part of it. It didn't much matter what he did or what he liked at that point, though it had to be whisky because that is what a “very important man” drinks when anesthetizing himself for what lies ahead.

  He went up to a spare bedroom, where he had hidden, on the Sunday night, the thing he had brought back from Norfolk. This was a twelve-bore shotgun. It wasn't loaded. Ivor would never have carried a loaded gun of any kind, not even when setting out to shoot something. Ammunition was in another desk drawer. He loaded the gun.

  By this time, according to a neighbor, the media were back. Ivor could have seen them from one of his front windows and he probably did. If they hadn't been there, I believe he would have put the gun back into the boot of his car and driven off to some secluded place. He once said to me, years before, that if he wanted to kill himself he wouldn't do it at home because that would contaminate (that was the word he used) the house for future occupants. But he couldn't get out to his car. There was a reporter sitting on his doorstep. There was no help for it but to do it in this house and I think the fear of “contaminating” the place was his reason for choosing a small room on the lower ground floor. This was part of a suite of bedroom, sitting room, and bathroom intended for live-in help but which he and Juliet had never used. Ivor went into the bedroom, unfurnished but for an old sofa Juliet had brought with her from Queen's Park.

  He didn't shut the door. I suppose he was anxious not to make it too difficult for his body to be found. He sat on the sofa, stuck the gun between his knees and, placing his head in the line of fire, pulled the trigger.

  30

  It's called the pathetic fallacy, isn't it, the tendency to credit nature with human emotions? The day was so mild, the autumn sky so blue, this sunny weather that I saw as indifference, as an affront to Ivor's downfall. I had read the evening paper in my office, called Iris, and set off for Westminster. It was just after half past four.

  Before I left I'd tried to phone Ivor but both his home phone and his mobile had been left on message. He'd be at home, I knew that. Where else would he have gone? I saw the reporters and the cameramen as I turned into Glanvill Street and when it was clear I meant to get into Ivor's house they crowded me. I told them I was Ivor Tesham's brother-in-law but I knew nothing. I didn't even know where he was.

  “In there,” a woman said. “The guy next door saw him go in.”

  She actually held on to me, clutching my jacket, while I rang the bell. I rang and rang until it was pointless to keep on. That was when I cursed not having a key to this house, but why should I have had one? I pushed my way back through the crowd. Helen, his cleaner, worked at a place at the end of the street most afternoons. Juliet had told me that, I don't know why. The reporters followed me as, praying that this was one of Helen's afternoons, I rang the doorbell, but no one was at home. That was when I remembered Martin Trenant, the QC who lived next door.

  He wouldn't be at home, of course. He'd be in court somewhere. And even if he was at home, why would he have a key? I battled back down the street, carried along by the press pack, one of the cameras actually knocking me on the head, while reporters asked me what I was doing and where I was going. On Trenant's doorstep I held my breath and thought I must be hallucinating when he opened the door.

  Surveying the press calmly, letting me in and closing the door smartly on everyone else, he said, “I think my wife has a key, only she's in Lisbon.” Was the woman never at home? “I'm sure we can find it.”

  It was hanging on a hook inside a clothes cupboard. We forced a passage through the reporters, Trenant shouting at them in a commanding voice to clear out of our way. We managed to get in and managed too not to let any of the media people in with us. The house seemed to be empty. It was insufferably stuffy, the air barely breathable. In that big open-plan living room where I'd met Sean Lynch at the house-warming party, I saw Ivor's will lying on top of the desk and read the first line: I, Ivor Hamilton Tesham of Canning House, Glanvill Street, Westminster, London SW1, hereby revoke all other wills …

  Like a fist closing, my heart seemed to squeeze. I said to Trenant to try upstairs. He'd had the key, it had been very good of him to come, to struggle through that hell and push in here, but I didn't want him with me. I half knew what I should find and I wanted to find it alone. Full of dread, he as much as me, I think, we went upstairs. That was when I remembered what Ivor had said about contaminating a
house, so he wouldn't have done it in his bedroom, not in that pretty bedroom Juliet had made into a boudoir of white lace and pale blue satin. He hadn't done it upstairs at all.

  It was cooler down in the basement, cool and dim. This floor was never used. All the more reason for him to have used it and there we found him, lying sprawled across Juliet's old sofa in what he had called “the maid's room.” Trenant glanced at him, cool as ever, and went back upstairs to phone the police, not hesitating, asking me nothing.

  Ivor's head was a mass of blood and blood was still coming from a wound above his right ear. The shotgun he'd used was on the floor. I went up to him very slowly, terribly afraid I might vomit. The blood was coming, so he wasn't dead, he couldn't be. I touched his hand, warm still. I tried to find a pulse but had no idea where to locate it on his wrist. Still holding his hand, I turned away—I had to; I couldn't bear to look at that blood, leaking, dripping—and with his hand now held in both mine, I sat on the floor and heard myself sob. Then I began to cry like one of my own children stricken by some nursery tragedy.

  I was helpless but I didn't know how I could have helped. Why the ambulance crew came first I don't know. Maybe Trenant phoned them as well, but however it was, medical help was there before the police arrived. They carried Ivor out on a stretcher and covered in a blanket, the feral reporters wild with excitement, one of them shouting at me that he'd heard the shot. I went in the ambulance with Ivor and they gave him blood on the way to hospital. As soon as we got there, I phoned Iris and told her to come as they might need next-of-kin. Sayers's Dr. Penberthy had been more successful at killing himself but he had used a pistol while Ivor had used a shotgun, always a dodgy suicide weapon. That was the first time I'd used the word and at the same time I thought that the will he'd left was his own idea of a suicide note.