The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  “It depends on what you mean by real harm. The Lady”— Ivor always referred to Margaret Thatcher as “the Lady”— “wouldn't like it. If I'm in line for promotion I wouldn't get it or not yet. If they used stuff about the handcuffs and the gag they'd make me look like some sort of pervert.” He tried to sound confident but didn't quite succeed. “You see, there'd be the little difficulty of me not going to the police when the media made it look like a real abduction and perhaps rather a larger difficulty when I didn't after they thought this Kelly Mason was the victim. But I really think that's all over now. I mean, with the interest moving to the Masons—even if Dermot comes round and talks, a pretty unlikely eventuality, would anyone believe him?”

  I'd decided not to join in this conversation.

  Iris said, “They'd want to see you, though, wouldn't they? They'd ask you if there was any connection between you and the Masons and maybe between you and Hebe.”

  He had thought of that, but being reminded of it brought that sullen look back to his face. “Well, perhaps, but no one knows about me and Hebe except you.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  One person knew or half knew, the woman friend of Hebe's who had provided her alibi. She had phoned him the night before but he didn't tell us that then. He wanted to get off the subject, that was clear. He had said he was off the hook and now it was starting to look as if he was still hung up on it. Ivor's is one of those natures that will put the best construction on a situation if possible, take the brightest view, be optimistic. It's a useful trait in a politician. After all, they never get up in Parliament and say the war was a mistake, the economy is in dire straits, and only darkness lies ahead, do they? Ivor sat up straight in his chair, asked for another gin, and said he had a feeling everything was going to be all right. It would blow over.

  “Let me take you out to lunch.”

  We didn't like going to restaurants with Nadine in her buggy. Disapproving glares from other diners made me cross and Iris nervous because I was cross. We assembled various leftovers, along with a cold chicken, for lunch and after that we all went for a walk on the Heath. It was sunny and getting warm, a beautiful time of the year, and we talked about other things.

  That was the last we saw of Ivor for a while. Iris told me at the beginning of June that she was pregnant and I of course was overjoyed. But even though we were preoccupied, Ivor wasn't absent from our minds and we thought about him a lot. We both felt he ought to have been in touch with the police from the moment he knew about the accident and this, up to a point, estranged us from him. Iris kept saying not going to the police was unlike him, she wouldn't have believed it of him. As for me, I thought it behavior characteristic of politicians, who become different people once they have a little power and can see the possibility of more power to come.

  We read the papers every day, more papers than we usually did. We watched more news on television and listened to more on radio. Most of the anonymous letters Damian Mason had received appeared, photographs of them or printed facsimiles. Tabloids daily carried pictures of Kelly Mason running out to her car or her frightened face at a window. One of her sisters, stupidly but in innocence, gave them a photograph of her in a bikini. No paper paid much attention to the inquests and only one of them, a broadsheet, mentioned them. Hebe Furnal must have had a funeral but no reporters or cameramen appeared to have attended it. Lloyd Freeman's, on the other hand, was a much-photographed big affair, his coffin half hidden by extravagant wreaths and crosses. There were nearly as many photographs of him as of Kelly Mason, including one taken at that party of Nicola Ross's, his arm round a woman who was probably his girlfriend.

  The most significant new information to appear was the police release that among the objects found in the crash car and strewn about the street where the accident had taken place was a gun. A nine-millimeter pistol, the Bond gun. When we read it Iris and I assumed this was part of the “props,” the paraphernalia Ivor had got Dermot to buy, but in this country, then and now, you can't go into a shop and buy a gun as you can handcuffs and gags. And this was a real one, though it seemed no ammunition was found with it.

  During that first week reference was made just once, as far as I saw, to Dermot Lynch. This was in a small paragraph at the foot of an inside page. It said that he still lay unconscious in hospital, but not which hospital, and that he had been visited only by his mother, Mrs. Philomena Lynch, and his brother Sean. Hebe had passed entirely away from media interest. A mistake had been made, they seemed to believe, and the best way to exonerate themselves from reproof was to avoid all mention of error. Hebe had been in the crash car, Hebe had been seen by a witness being forced into that car, and Hebe was dead, but all that was unimportant, was in the past and best forgotten. Whether the police also thought that way I doubt. Probably they were looking at both possibilities, that either Hebe or Kelly Mason might have been the intended victim, but if they were the press was uninterested.

  Ivor had tried, with some success at first, to make us believe his worries were over. Dermot Lynch would never recover, would never speak rationally and coherently about what had happened. But he didn't really think this way. Very badly injured people do recover consciousness, sometimes after months of coma, and they especially do so now (and seventeen years ago) that medical science has made such advances. Ivor knew this as well as I did and worried about it. In the weeks following the accident he apparently made several attempts to find out where Dermot was and what condition he was in. He told us this later on, but only when he wanted help in finding the hospital Dermot had been taken to.

  He had the Lynches' address in Rowley Place, Paddington, a Westminster City Council complex of blocks of flats where Dermot had lived with his mother and brother. He had their phone number. Of course he also had the phone number of the garage in Vauxhall where Dermot had worked. But he was afraid to phone either number, though “afraid” wasn't the word he used. All the time, while this business was troubling him, he was hoping Dermot would never “come to,” as he put it, preferably would die, and because of his upbringing and education and social life, and hangovers from a religious teenage he still retained, was aware too that this desire of his was monstrous and shocking.

  He had thought and thought often that he could phone Mrs. Lynch, say he was a friend of Dermot's and ask after him, but there were objections to this. One of these was his voice. His was the accent of the upper class—and their accent is quite different from that of an educated middle-class person, as I expect you've noticed—and he had no gift for disguising it. He might be Dermot's employer (which indeed he briefly had been) or a client of the garage (which he was) but Dermot's mother would never believe he was Dermot's friend. There was the question too of how much about the birthday present Dermot had told his mother. Very little probably, because she would most likely have disapproved. But he might well have told his brother and told him the name of the man who employed him. Ivor decided this was unlikely, as Sean Lynch would surely have come forward if he had information for the police, but still he disliked the idea of calling Sean Lynch in case he put ideas into the man's head which might not have been there before.

  Attempting to discover Dermot's whereabouts was a better way forward. Ivor told us, or told Iris, that he had never before phoned a hospital to find out the condition of a patient but he assumed the switchboard would put him through to the appropriate ward. This didn't happen. He was asked if he was a relative and, when he said he was just a friend, was told they could give out no information except to close relatives. His inquiry as to whether Dermot was in there met with a frostier response. They couldn't tell him that either. And so it went on. At last a hospital in northwest London admitted that Dermot was among its patients but it could tell him nothing more because he wasn't a relative. Ivor considered posing as a relative but soon dismissed this idea. He couldn't bring himself to do it, for he thought he would be worse off afterward, ashamed, full of self-disgust, and maybe even more vulnerable
. It would be his first admission to the outside world of his involvement in the abduction and the accident. Almost superstitiously, he thought he would be exposing himself to discovery and could expect those things he had so far avoided, visits from the police, phone calls from the press, dreadful paragraphs in diary pieces.

  The kidnap story disappeared from the front pages, went inside, vanished altogether from television, until one day it was gone. It had blown over. Everywhere but in Ivor's mind, that is, and also one supposes in Kelly and Damian Mason's. To Ivor, contrary to what he had expected, the absence of the story was worse than its presence. Its departure left him to imagine silent workings under the untroubled surface and his imagination was very active. It presented to him awful scenarios. Unknown to him or to almost anyone, except perhaps Gerry Furnal and Damian Mason, along with the police, wheels were turning, schemes were being concocted and plans laid. Dermot had regained consciousness and, in his fuddled and confused state, muttered a hitherto unconsidered name, hinted at a game, a joke. His mother was even now talking to the police about terribly damaging revelations. Then, also, there was that unknown quantity, Lloyd Freeman's girlfriend. At the tail end of the story, one of the last images on television had been Lloyd's funeral and the wreaths and crosses of spring flowers. There had been a woman at that funeral, young as far as could be seen, a veil of black gauze covering her head and face, making her un recognizable. The same picture was in the papers and Ivor got it into his head that this was Lloyd's girlfriend, a woman to whom Lloyd might have told everything before he went off that evening on his last drive.

  All these imagined happenings he passed on to Iris when he called her one morning to ask for her help. I was away in Manchester for a couple of days, sorting out the problems faced by a firm of insurers based in that city. If I'd been there I don't think she would have done what he asked. Certainly I'd have tried to dissuade her. But she did it. She phoned Philomena Lynch, said she was from a local newspaper and was inquiring about her son Dermot, who, she understood, was still in hospital.

  She told me about it when I got home. It was bad enough doing it, she said, but it would have been worse to keep it from me.

  “He was in such a state, Rob. He'd worked himself up into absolute terror. He's been imagining police coming into the House of Commons after him.”

  “What did she say, this Mrs. Lynch?”

  “Well, she said Dermot was still unconscious but the hospital had told her not to give up hope. They'd known worse cases where the person had come through and been all right.”

  “Satisfy my curiosity,” I said. “Which newspaper did you say you worked for?”

  “The Paddington Express. I made it up. I thought it was quite clever.”

  “It sounds like a train,” I said, and she laughed, but it was an uneasy laugh.

  In fact, there was a local paper called the Paddington Express, but I don't know if they ever found out about Iris's impersonation. Ivor was somewhat comforted by the results of this phone call. At least it showed him that his worst fears were groundless, all that paranoid stuff about wheels grinding and turning under the surface and the police silently planning when to strike. Iris was rather ashamed of herself. Not long after she'd made the phone call she said she put herself in Philomena's shoes and wondered how she'd feel if Nadine were in hospital and some impostor called to find out how she was.

  ABOUT THREE WEEKS after this, toward the end of June, Ivor was alone in his flat in Old Pye Street. It was coming up to nine in the evening and the phone rang. He was still in the stage of never answering the phone without being apprehensive that it might be Jane Atherton or Gerry Furnal or the police (not to mention Lloyd Freeman's girlfriend or a member of the Lynch family) and he kept to his new habit of replying with a single brusque, “Yes?”

  It wasn't any of those people but one of the Prime Minister's aides at Number Ten. The Prime Minister would like to see him at eight-thirty on the following morning. Ivor wasn't so far gone in paranoia that he thought Mrs. Thatcher wanted to cast him into outer darkness because she'd found out about the birthday present. He knew what the phone call meant. A mini-reshuffle was expected and this was promotion. Elevation. By eight forty-five next day he would be an Under-Secretary of State in a government department, the next rung on the ascending ladder to power.

  8

  Hebe tried to change her accent to what is called received pronunciation, but the Newcastle came through in unguarded moments. Still, I hadn't realized that her parents were quite such Geordies, the sort of people who would call their daughter Hilda before she renamed herself. She had more or less cut herself off from them for years. They came down for the funeral, as they put it, though Mummy always says that wherever you live you come up to London, and they brought an aunt of Hebe's with them, a woman who looked like someone's cleaner. A lot of friends of Hebe's were there, girls I had never seen before, not all of them dressed as I think one should be. You don't wear skirts inches above the knees for a funeral and you don't wear bright red. Gerry's mother came, of course, chatting away to everyone. She only managed to shut up while the vicar was conducting the service.

  The least I could do was offer to go up to Irving Road on the following Monday, but when I got there I found a strange woman in the kitchen, drinking coffee and giving Justin his breakfast. She wasn't really a strange woman but the one in the red miniskirt I'd seen at Hebe's funeral. Gerry was there too, of course, about to go to work. He introduced me, said this is Grania, and didn't I get the message he left on my answering machine? I didn't. I get so few I mostly don't bother. He said he had had so many offers of help he has got someone coming in every day this week and next. I thought how awful this would be for Justin, one strange woman after another, but I didn't say anything. I went up to Justin to kiss him, but he turned his face sharply away and leaned as far away from me out of his high chair as he could without falling.

  I'd taken a week of my holiday that was owing me but I didn't say that either. When I had spoken to him at the funeral Gerry had asked me if I'd do him a tremendous favor and get rid of Hebe's clothes for him. Sort them out and take them to the Oxfam shop or something. Perhaps I'd also dispose of her jewelry. She'd been buried with her wedding ring but he would like to keep her engagement ring and one or two other things he had given her, a locket with a picture of Justin in it and a gold bangle. I said I would do that, but I didn't much like the way I was being treated, considering I was putting myself out for him.

  “I can't do it today,” I said. “It will have to wait.” Hebe always used to say that if you want to get hold of or keep a man you should play hard to get. Why not begin as I meant to go on? “I'll come back on Thursday. I'll be free then.”

  This was Grania's cue. She handed me a cup of coffee and said she could do it, it would give her something to do while she was there. I was about to tell her she would have enough to do in that house without sorting through clothes—I suspect she likes clothes a lot, even if they're someone else's— but Gerry got in first and said she'd have her hands full with Justin. Jane will do it, he said, and then he went off to work.

  When she was sure he was out of the house and heard the front door bang, Grania said, “I'm glad to have a chance to talk to you.”

  I said nothing but drank my coffee. Justin put up his arms to be lifted out of the chair but he put them up to her, not to me. She lifted him out and told him to go and play.

  I said, “What do you want to talk about?” and she said, “Did you know Hebe was having an affair?”

  So I wasn't the only one she had confided in. I said nothing, just kept very still.

  She looked at me with her head a bit on one side. She is a tall, thin woman, about thirty, with long, dark hair. Her jeans were very tight and her heels were very high and it looked as if bending over to pick Justin up might have been a problem.

  “I phoned once or twice in the evenings and she wasn't in. Gerry said she was out with you. It must have been three times I ph
oned and that's what he said. I thought it a bit strange Hebe going out with a woman in the evening. She could have seen you in the daytime or the weekends, couldn't she?”

  “What do you want me to say, Grania?”

  “I don't know what you mean by that,” she said, looking offended. “I asked her. She said he was a VIP and something in the government and it was bound to come out into the open some time but to keep it dark for now.”

  I said I knew nothing about it and then I went to find Justin. But it proved one thing to me, that I was no more important to Hebe than she was. Justin was in the living room, sitting on the floor, surrounded by the contents of his toy box, saying, “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,” in a singsong but not obviously unhappy voice. When he saw me he rolled over onto his front and stuffed his fists into his eyes.

  By the time I went back on Thursday Gerry had left for work and this time the woman-in-residence, the Justin-carer, was Lucy Compton, who was one of Hebe's bridesmaids. I was the other one. We must have looked ludicrous in our pale blue satin and wreaths of cornflowers, for Lucy is five feet ten and I am five feet two. But she was a welcome change from Grania. I didn't mind her. On Monday I had thought I was Hebe's best friend, her closest woman friend, but now I was beginning to doubt it. Justin behaved with her as if he was used to her being in the house: let her pick him up and cuddle him; as soon as she sat down, went to her and climbed on her knee.

  It makes me feel like Hebe deceived me, the way she deceived everyone, letting me think I was really important to her. I may as well be honest and not pretend. I feel rejected, jealous of her because of Hebe as well as Justin. The past is being destroyed, made to mean something different from what I'd thought, and I wonder if Hebe just made a convenience of me, if I wasn't important to her at all. I was useful because I agreed to provide an alibi for her whereas perhaps these others didn't. Maybe she had asked Lucy but Lucy wouldn't. I waited for her to ask me if I knew Hebe was having an affair but she didn't, she just said a lot of very conventional things about how terrible it is to die young and what a tragedy for Gerry and Justin.