The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  “She'd bring him with her, you know,” I said.

  “Do you think she would?” he said. “I hadn't thought of that. It would be a bit of a drawback.”

  I'm very fond of Ivor, but I wasn't then. As sometimes happened, I came near to disliking him for a moment or two. I'd be aware of his charm and that sort of dashing reckless quality he had, and then he'd say something to turn it all around, almost shocking me.

  “Even supposing she left her husband, and it doesn't seem to me you've any reason to think she would, what happens next? Furnal and she would get divorced surely and she'd get custody of Justin.” I used his name because calling him “the child” was distasteful.

  “But would she, Rob? I mean, she'd have been the one committing adultery.”

  I told him he was supposed to be a lawyer and hadn't he ever heard of no-fault divorce? Unless she was a criminal or a druggie she'd get custody, never mind how saintly Gerry Furnal might be.

  “I hadn't thought of that,” he said. “I couldn't stand having that child around. It's bad enough when we're talking on the phone.” He seemed not to notice my slight recoil. I took a deep swig of my wine. “If Gerry divorced her I'd have to marry her, wouldn't I?”

  “Ivor,” I said, “for someone so advanced in your sexual tastes”—I remembered in time I'd better not admit to knowing what Iris had told me in confidence—”you're surprisingly old-fashioned. A mistress in a love nest, a clandestine love affair, and now you think you'd have to save her honor. Of course you wouldn't have to marry her, but I think you'd have to share your home with her. You'd have to live with her.”

  “I hate that word home,” he said. “In that context, I mean. Ghastly Americanism. Can't you just hear some fat woman talking about her lovely home? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm a bastard.”

  I asked him tentatively if he'd given any thought to what the press might make of all this.

  “At least you didn't say the ‘print media.' “ He laughed. “I may be a new PPS,” he said, “but I'm still a very small fish in a huge pond. My God, I've just realized, that's what ‘small fry' means, isn't it? Small fish. We live and learn. There's a pretty awful play by Barrie that Morningford Amateur Dramatic Society put on. It's called Mary Rose and of course I had to go and see it. Someone says, ‘We live and learn,' and the reply is, ‘We live at any rate.' It's the only good line in the play.” He smiled his small half-smile. “The press isn't interested in me having a girlfriend. Prurient they may be when it suits them, but even they allow for a bit of sex in people's lives.”

  “When the sex involves a girlfriend who's married and living with her husband?”

  “They don't know that, do they? They don't watch her house or mine. If one of them happened to be passing on the relevant evening once a fortnight, all they'd see is a beautiful blond girl coming to my block. Might be visiting anyone. Might live there.”

  “I don't know,” I said. “I just think you ought to be careful.”

  In the months to come I was to remember this conversation. It made me think about the unforeseen and how we walk all the time on that thin crust that covers terrible abysses. Things might so easily have been different from what they are if a word spoken or a word withheld hadn't changed them. If Ivor, for instance, had said “no” instead of “yes” when Jack Munro asked him to that reception in the Jubilee Room.

  2

  I get my surname, Delgado, from my grandfather, who came to this country from Badajoz in the 1930s, and I sometimes think it's a blessing I seem to have inherited a thin gene along with the name, which is Spanish for slim. It would be a liability for the overweight to be saddled with the name. But I'm thin and tallish and otherwise in conspicuous, sallow and bespectacled—to please Iris I'm at last thinking of getting contact lenses—with an unexpectedly deep voice and, for some reason, an almost silent laugh. I laughed in my noise less way when Iris said Ivor was borrowing our house because its rafish kitschy interior was appropriate for his purpose.

  At that time we had a cottage in the country quite near Iris's family home in Ramburgh and another cottage or little house in one of the cobbled mewses of Hampstead. This was the place we were to lend Ivor. It had been a wedding present from Iris's parents, who had bought it for us with all the decor and furnishings fashionable in the 1930s, when the Hollywood Moderne style was in vogue, and unchanged by the previous owners. Coming in from the mews, it was quite a shock. The outside of the house was nineteenth-century brickwork hung with clematis and roses, green shutters at the windows, and a lantern over the front door. Visitors walked in on chrome, black, and silver, scuffed white leather furniture (soon to be stained by Nadine and her younger brother coating it with raspberry jam and Marmite), a great mural of the New York skyline at night, and a wall-size black and yellow abstract framed in aluminium. Upstairs was worse, or the larger of the two bedrooms was. Our huge bed—was this what appealed to Ivor?—was very low, its mattress almost on the floor, which was covered in once-white shagpile. Someone before our time had spilled about a pint of coffee on it, or that was one view to take. Iris said it was more as if a former owner had given birth there. We meant to cover the stain with a rug, just as we meant to give the house a makeover when we could afford it. I insisted we keep the circular mirror that had lightbulbs all round its frame and reminded me of an old film magazine photograph I'd once seen of Claudette Colbert's house in Beverly Hills.

  I asked Iris what Ivor meant by “appropriate for his purpose.”

  ‘The right atmosphere,' was what he said. I didn't ask what sort of atmosphere he wanted.”

  “I don't suppose we shall ever know,” I said.

  WE'D BEEN INVITED to the theater by Ivor that evening and we looked on it as a celebration for him. He had just been made a whip. The play was Julius Caesar, with a famous theatrical knight as Brutus and Nicola Ross playing Calpurnia. After it was over we all went round to Nicola's dressing room to have champagne and take her out to supper. It wasn't my business even to wish it, but I couldn't help reflecting how much better it would be if she and Ivor were still together and it was she he was thinking of living with. After a minute or two the young black actor playing Casca put his head round the door and Nicola called him in. She introduced him as Lloyd Freeman, and we were soon all talking about black people taking parts that had been intended for white actors. Was it a problem? If audiences could suspend their disbelief in middle-aged women playing Juliet and fat divas singing tubercular Mimi, why not accept a black Mark Antony? Lloyd said he was lucky to have the part he had, but he'd only got it because it was a very small one. Could we imagine him in a Pinero revival, for instance?

  We talked about black and Indian characters in books all being comic or evil up to World War II and beyond, and Othello the only serious role for a black man, and I was starting to wonder how Lloyd made a living, when he said he also drove for a minicab company in which he was a partner with a friend. Ivor was interested—Iris and I agreed afterward that he probably wanted to use one of these minicabs for taking Hebe home after their meetings—and Lloyd gave him a card. After that Lloyd went home and we went off to supper.

  I never saw him again, and I don't suppose I ever gave him a thought until the time of the accident. The papers had photographs of him too, though not so many as of Hebe. He was a good actor, and whenever I see a play on the West End stage with black people in the cast I think of him. Because the impossible, which was the view he took, has happened. I saw a black Henry V last year and a black Henry VI last week, and I thought how I might have seen Lloyd in Julius Caesar again, but playing Cassius this time. I never can because he's dead. It wasn't Ivor's fault that he died, but without Ivor he'd no doubt be alive today. He was thirty-two, so he'll have to age another year when he gets to heaven.

  The other man, Dermot Lynch, I never met. I heard his voice once when I was in Ivor's flat. He had come around to collect Ivor's car and take it away for a service. “I'll pop the keys through the door as per usual, guv,” I heard him say
, and I wondered whether Ivor, who expected to be called “sir,” would object to being addressed like a police inspector in a sitcom. He can't have minded much, because Dermot Lynch was the other man he chose to carry out the birthday present.

  I shall call it that now because it's as “the birthday present” that Iris and I referred to it, rather than as “the accident,” whenever we spoke of it in the future. Back in the early part of 1990, of course, we had no idea what Ivor was planning, only that he wanted our house on the nearest Friday to May seventeenth, and after a time we gathered this was Hebe's birthday. He bought her a present as well, a string of pearls, and, in an unusual display of openness, showed it to us.

  “They're beautiful,” Iris said, “but the trouble with pearls is that you have to be an expert to tell whether they're worth thousands or they came from a chain store.”

  “That's not the trouble,” Ivor said. “That's the point. She can wear them and Furnal won't know she didn't buy them herself.”

  IVOR WAS A good constituency MP. Even after he got to be a minister he still went down to Ramburgh most weeks to hold his Morningford surgery on a Saturday morning. If the weekends he spent in London were usually free, the ones in Norfolk weren't. Especially in the summer, there would be an appearance to put in at some local festival or f^te and often a dinner to attend and speak at in the evening. There was always a cause that needed his patronage or a concern one of his constituents wanted raised with the relevant minister. At the time of the birthday present or just before it was the proposal to close a local hospital, the kind of place they used to call a “cottage hospital,” he was opposing. He'd attended all the meetings of the Hands Off Our Hospital committee but he drew the line at taking part in the march through Morningford culminating in a mass demo in the town square. It was a Conservative government that supported the hospital closure and he was, after all, a Conservative whip. As he put it, he didn't want the wrong sort of limelight. He was very aware of this sort of thing, perhaps neurotically aware.

  When he visited his constituency he stayed at Ramburgh House with his parents, a place considered by John and Louisa to be as much his as theirs. They had told him that when he married they would give it up to him and move into the lodge, quite an attractive but much smaller house at the eastern end of the estate. It seemed to me that they were safe for years, as marriage was the last thing on Ivor's mind.

  Ramburgh House was a biggish Queen Anne place, one of those manor houses that stand in the center of the village, separated from its main street only by a narrow strip of grass and paving and approached through an arch in a high brick wall. All the land, the garden, the park, and a couple of meadows and woodland were at the rear, and the lodge stood about half a mile away, at the end of what they called the East Avenue, a lane running between a double row of lime trees. It's a measure of Ivor's old-fashioned (and slightly absurd) sense of the dignity due to the landed gentry that he called the lodge “the dower house.”

  I don't suppose there is anything particularly remarkable about the grounds—the land is flat, its only distinguishing feature the little river running between rows of alders—and the house itself gets only a terse paragraph in Pevsner's Buildings of Norfolk. But Ivor was very fond of the place and, if his father behaved like a squire of old, he conducted himself a bit like the heir apparent, having the vicar and his wife to dinner and dropping in on the locals to hear their complaints about rents and repairs. Now, of course, most of the locals have died and the places they lived in have become weekend cottages for Londoners.

  Our own cottage was ten miles away but well within Ivor's constituency. We voted in Hampstead and we had the right to vote in local elections, though not in parliamentary ones. It wasn't easy for us to attend any of those functions Ivor spoke at, but we did manage to get along to the Morningford Eel Feast, an annual thrash in the town hall whose origins were lost in antiquity. Traditionally, only local eels were consumed, but these had become scarce over the years and it was rumored that half of those eaten at the April 1990 feast came from Thailand. I don't know if there are any eels in Thailand or if we import them if there are, but this was the story that went around the tables that year. Iris and I were able to go because the feast happens at lunchtime, so we could take Nadine with us.

  Ivor made a speech, a very good speech I suppose it was, with the requisite eel jokes and stories about the glorious past of Morningford and its even more illustrious future, nothing about the hospital closure but rather a lot about the benefits the then government had brought to the town. Just the same, I wasn't sorry when Nadine started to grizzle and then to scream and we had to take her out. I heard afterward that there had been one or two sticky questions put to Ivor, the most awkward being how long would Margaret Thatcher remain prime minister. Apparently, he got around it by heaping praise on her.

  Very unusually for him, he had no engagement that evening and he came over to Monks Cravery to see us. Iris asked him how Hebe was and he said fine and he'd already told her about the pearls. This is a strange business, asking people how they are or someone close to them is. We all do it all the time, and now we're doing it even more than we did seventeen years ago. But the last thing we want is to hear about someone's state of health, and nothing is more boring than to be told in reply that they woke up feeling under the weather but they're a bit better now apart from a slight headache. No, what we expect is to hear news or details of some recent experience or escapade or even to be shocked by death and disaster. Iris wasn't anticipating anything like that, but nor was she content with Ivor's short response.

  “Well, tell us, was she pleased?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Who wouldn't be? She'd been telling me for months how much she loved pearls. Of course she'd be pleased.”

  I mention this because those pearls figured quite importantly in what was to come. Not for a long time, not until the quiet period when it seemed the birthday present (I mean the other one) was far in the past and Ivor had begun to think it was all over. Begun to think the terrible fear was gone forever and nothing like it would ever come again, his sleepless nights and his dread of newspapers. Gerry Furnal was married to his second wife, Justin was growing up and was soon to have a half-sister. But through the years those pearls must have lain in their black leather velvet-lined case in a drawer somewhere in Gerry Furnal's house in his distant suburb or journeyed back and forth in Jane Atherton's handbag, their presence accepted by Furnal as he accepted Hebe's other jewelry, the stuff from Oxfam shops and Costa Brava market stalls. If they weren't worth a king's ransom (are kings ever held to ransom?), their value was probably the same as that of all the Furnal furniture and equipment put together.

  LONG AFTERWARD, WHEN it was confession time, advice time, and desperate help-seeking time, Ivor told me about meeting Lloyd Freeman once more at a party given by Nicola Ross. Nicola was always giving parties; no reason such as an anniversary or Christmas was needed to excuse them. Iris and I had been invited but couldn't find a babysitter.

  Shy people get to parties early because if they're among the first they won't have to walk in on a roomful of unknown guests. Ivor wasn't shy, far from it, and on this occasion he didn't arrive until the party had been going for about an hour. He intended, of course, to stay late. Nicola always invited too many people and the place was crowded. Ivor pushed his way through the throng, avoiding those he didn't want to talk to because they bored him, and came face-to-face with Lloyd. They talked for a minute or two, the usual how-are-you-what-have-you-been-doing stuff, Ivor said, and then he thought he might as well put his proposition to Lloyd there and then. By that time, he had already spoken to Dermot Lynch and Dermot had agreed.

  A waiter hired for the occasion was going round refilling glasses and both of them had some more Merlot. In those days quite abstemious, Ivor always drank a lot at parties, though he never showed a sign of it as far as I could see. Lloyd, he said, gave him the impression of being one who stoked up on free wine when he got the
chance. Ivor reminded him of what he'd told him in Nicola's dressing room about his minicab business. Would he do a driving job for him? He needed a posh sort of car (his words), maybe a black Mercedes with blacked-out windows in the rear. It was to pick up a girl and bring her to a house in Hampstead on a Friday evening in a few weeks' time. There'd be a second driver if need be.

  “It sounds okay,” Lloyd said. “How far would it be?”

  “Five or six miles. No more. Five hundred pounds.”

  Lloyd went quiet. “What's the catch?”

  “No catch,” said Ivor, “but complications.”

  “Look, why don't you call me? I've got to go. My girlfriend's looking for me.”

  She came up to them, took Lloyd's arm, and pulled him away. That was the first time Ivor saw her, a very pretty dark-haired woman, but white like a Spaniard or a Portuguese, with magnificent breasts shown off in a low-cut top. The ankles weren't mentioned at that time. Ivor noticed the breasts, as any man would, and the lovely face and full red lips, but she wasn't his type and he thought, he said, of Hebe's extravagant slenderness and delicate features and cascading fair hair. He asked himself too, in that moment, what the hell he was doing longing for a woman who ought to have been there at the party with him, a married woman who wanted the best of both worlds, a husband and a lover, and who couldn't escape more than once a fortnight. But longing and reproaching himself didn't stop him going on with the birthday present.

  He phoned Lloyd the following week and arranged to meet him and Dermot Lynch in a pub in Victoria. He didn't know it and neither of them had ever been there before. That was the point, I suppose. Lloyd got there first and was businesslike about the “complications,” how he and Dermot were to buy balaclavas to wear, handcuffs, and a gag for Hebe. Dermot, who was a great gesticulator, a man who talked with his hands, rolled his eyes at this, held up a thumb, and winked when Ivor told them where they should go for these “props” and handed them money to cover it and cover too the renting of the car. He repeated his offer of five hundred pounds to pick up a woman and drive her from a point north of the North Circular Road to Hampstead. Lloyd nodded and, though Ivor didn't ask him for any undertaking, said he wouldn't tell anyone.