by Barbara Vine
When I could escape from these platitudes I went upstairs to begin my task of clearing out Hebe's clothes, but first I went to the drawer where I know she kept her jewels. There was a lot of junk in there, necklaces mostly, which I wouldn't dignify with the name of costume jewelry, and a small plastic box containing the engagement ring, the locket, and the bracelet. I'd brought three large plastic bin bags with me and a carrier. The junk went into the carrier and I felt in the back of the drawer and brought out the flat black leather case in which the pearls were lying on a bed of pink velvet.
They were beautiful but could I say they were more beautiful than any you see in a chain store? I couldn't and I know Gerry couldn't. She'd told him they came from the British Home Stores and he took her word for it without question. I wondered what Ivor Tesham paid for them. A thousand pounds? Five? More? I sat down on the bed, which Gerry said he hadn't slept in since she died, and I began thinking a lot of thoughts that are bad and base, not to say criminal. Do other people think like this when temptation comes in their way? Do they consider possibilities that would land them in court, in prison? Or do such things never cross their minds because they are honest, they are good people who, if these possibilities were suggested to them, would simply shake their heads and smile? Well, I expect I'd be good and all smiles if I'd had their luck and their chances, but life hasn't been very fair to me, to say the least.
Who would know if I took these pearls to a jeweler and asked him to value them? And when he had valued them said to him, will you buy them from me? Gerry believes what Hebe told him about where they came from. As far as he knows or cares, they are worth no more than the string of red glass beads I had just dropped into the carrier. He will expect them to disappear along with the beads and the carved-wood bracelet and the plastic lapel pin. My parents gave me the deposit on the studio flat I live in but I have a mortgage and I am poor. The library pays me a wage— it calls it a salary—not much more than half the national average and my (late) father called it disgraceful for a woman with an upper second from a good university. My car once belonged to my parents, who gave it to me when they bought a new and better one. The furniture in the flat is their castoffs.
I would like a new car and a new carpet and a decent big TV. I'd like some clothes and not the sort that come from Dorothy Perkins. I didn't have to decide then and there, I could think about it, but there was no reason why I shouldn't take the pearls home with me. After all, if I left them behind, one of these friends of Hebe's, whoever was on duty next day, some other greedy gossip, might go rooting about in this room and find them and take them home with her.
I'd brought my handbag upstairs with me and I put the pearls in their case inside it. I didn't have to decide. I didn't even have to think about it, but I did think about it. I couldn't help myself. I'm still thinking about it now. A jeweler might refuse to buy them from me unless I could prove they're mine and I have a right to them. I've heard that's what happens. I took the case out of the bag again and read on the underside of it that the pearls were bought from As-prey's. I know where Asprey's is, it's in Bond Street. Suppose I were to be very bold and tell the jeweler they were given to me by Ivor Tesham and if he wanted to check Mr. Tesham would confirm it? Would he confirm it? I think so. He would if he was afraid I'd tell Gerry he was Hebe's lover.
I read two significant items in my paper this morning. One was that Tesham has been made a junior minister in the Department of Defence and the other is that the police had found a gun in the wreckage of the crash car. I am wondering now if those men in the car really made a mistake when they took Hebe. She was going to Tesham, she told me so; she was going to be taken there in a car and given her birthday present. It looks like he paid them to fetch her but he can't have done. He wouldn't have had a gun, not an MP— would he?
I started going through her clothes. I took them off their hangers in the clothes cupboard and laid them on the bed: light summer dresses, miniskirts, T-shirts, tops, jeans, a couple of coats, no rain coat. Women like Hebe don't have raincoats, they totter on high heels holding up small umbrellas and getting wet, squealing because the rain is spoiling their hair. Did Gerry never look in this cupboard? I suppose not. At the back, behind the shoes, mostly strappy things with high heels, was a small case standing on the bottom of the cupboard. I opened it and I was shocked. But not only shocked. I thought, I have found the excitement I thought I had lost.
A DOG COLLAR of black leather with spikes is the first thing I see. There are thigh boots—not the lace-up ones, she was wearing them—and crotchless knickers and platform bras, fishnet stockings, a black lace corselette. A black leather miniskirt, very brief, a corset with suspenders, the kind of things you see in Ann Summers's windows if you look, only I don't look for more than half a minute. Why would I? They aren't for women like me. I give them a quick glance and then look away. Because all this stuff gives me a strange feeling that I don't want. I hate it, I disapprove of it, but it excites me. And not in a way that I like. If I feel desire, I mean sexual desire, I want to feel it for someone, not like this, a kind of intense but undirected longing—for what? For myself? To be touched by anyone? It wouldn't matter who.
I didn't take the things out of the case. There was more underneath I didn't even look at. I could feel a pulse beating in my chest. I was breathless and if Lucy had come in I don't think I could have spoken. I closed the lid and fastened it and put the case inside one of the plastic bin bags. What I'm going to do with it and its contents I didn't know. I still don't know. Temporarily, the pearls had gone out of my head.
The bin bags and the carrier and my handbag I took downstairs and put them in the boot of my car. Lucy had gone out with Justin. I walked about downstairs a bit, thinking how Gerry had wanted me with him and would have gone on wanting me if those other girls hadn't interfered. I thought then that I'd probably seen him for the last time. As for Justin, he used to like me, we always got on all right. I suppose the truth is his father has turned him against me, or Grania and Lucy have. But this sort of thing is always happening to me. I ought to be used to it by now. I wrote a note for Lucy, saying I'd taken all the clothes and to tell Gerry I'd dispose of them, and I left without a backward glance.
AT HOME IN the evening with nothing to do and nowhere to go as usual, I looked at the pearls again, at the creamy pallor of them, the delicate bloom which is on all pearls, real or cultured or fake. But I wasn't really thinking about them, I was thinking about Ivor Tesham. He would have left the House of Commons by this time and be at home in his flat in Old Pye Street, Westminster. Unless he had gone out. I pictured him leading an exciting life, dizzy and expensive, in clubs and at premières, very unlike my own—the sort I don't know much about apart from what I read in the papers. A new girl would be with him, for I don't suppose he was being faithful to Hebe's memory. He and his life are so different from me and mine that we might belong not just to different sexes but to different species. Unlike me and Gerry. We are the same sort of people. I'm much more his sort of woman than Hebe was. She was like Tesham or would have got like him if she had lived a bit longer. I suddenly see them together in a luxurious bedroom, she in that corselette and that dog collar and he gazing at her, a picture I squeeze my eyes shut to escape. That man frightens me and makes me shiver, but I knew then that I couldn't let him get away from me and disappear from my life.
It was several evenings later, and my holiday that was no holiday from the library was over, when I phoned him. I'd put the pearls away in a drawer but I got them out and looked at them every day, and they seemed to me not just beautiful but a weapon of power. When I was a child and afraid of someone, Mummy used to say to me, “They can't eat you.” Ivor Tesham couldn't eat me. I'd forgotten his number but it was in the phone book. This time when I'd looked it up I wrote it down on the pad I keep by the phone.
When I'd spoken to him before he'd made me feel naïve. I'm not naïve now, I've changed and grown older. I'd started crying too and now that seems rid
iculous. I picked up the phone and dialed the number on the pad, but before anyone answered I put the receiver back and tried to think a bit more about what I was doing and what I was going to say when I spoke to him. If I did. Should I just trust to the inspiration of the moment? I poured myself a glass of wine and sat by the phone, thinking. I was conscious of a new feeling, something I'd never felt before. It was a sense of power and it came to me through the pearls. I fetched them in their case, opened it and touched them. I can have power over Ivor Tesham, over a Minister of the Crown, a law-maker. And not quite knowing what it is he had in mind when he got those two men to pick up Hebe in the street, that didn't matter. He won't know that I don't precisely know, only that I know he is involved, a major actor in the play.
I remembered his voice and his suave tones, his photograph in Dod's, his biographical details (Eton and Brasenose, called to the Bar), where he was and where I was. For he is rich and good-looking, a Member of Parliament, some kind of minister, increasingly powerful, while I belong to an invisible group, the ignored women that most people don't know exist in the 1990s. In the 1890s, yes, they'd say, but not now. Not sixty years after all women got the vote, after the success of the feminist movement, after no profession is closed to them and equal pay is coming. But we are there and in our thousands. We go to bed alone and get up alone, go to work on a bus or a tube, eat a sandwich for lunch alone or with another similarly placed woman, go home by bus or tube to a tiny flat or a room in a shared flat. The highlight of the week is a film we see with the flat-sharer. There are few or no men in our lives because we never meet any. The men at work are married or engaged or living with someone. We have all, of course, had at least one affair or a two-or three-night stand, with a married man whose guilt or fear soon deprived us of his company. Weekends that mean so much to the attached, the ones with lovers or husbands and families, are our worst days and afternoons our worst time. None of us is much to look at, of course, none of us has charm or that vitality men like. As we approach thirty and pass it we know there are no unmarried men left for us and there will be no children except the sort that come out of a bottle. I don't suppose Ivor Tesham has given a thought to a single one of us, the faceless tribe, except, as in my case, to whether we can provide alibis for his married girlfriend when she comes to prance about his bedroom in lace-up boots and frilly camisoles.
I was just going to dial that number when the phone rang. I hoped it might be Gerry but, of course, it was Mummy. How had the funeral gone?
“It went,” I said. “What do you expect?”
There was no need for me to speak like that, she said, she was only making a simple inquiry. It wouldn't be right if she didn't take an interest. “How is he taking it?”
I said he was all right. It hadn't been a very happy marriage.
“You've never said anything like that before, Jane,” she said.
“Maybe not, but she wasn't dead before, was she?”
Responding to that was beneath her notice, I suppose. She said she'd paid “a certain sum” into my bank account in advance of my birthday next month. “A certain sum” with her is always fifty pounds, so of course I said thank you very much, though I don't have a very high opinion of people who think they can buy your affection with money. But, for some reason, talking to her gave me confidence, and when she had rung off I took a deep breath and dialed Ivor Tesham's number. It started to ring. They have red boxes to take home, these ministers, don't they? Boxes full of papers, I imagine, though of what kind I don't know. After the tenth ring he picked up the phone (looking up from those papers, I suppose) and again said, “Yes?” in that supercilious tone I don't think he would use if he expected the Prime Minister on the line.
“This is Jane Atherton.”
A pause. He's great on pauses. Then he said, “Ah, the alibi lady.”
That voice had its effect on me. Not enough to make me cry and put the receiver down, as it did before, but sufficient to sap my energy and make me feel like abandoning whatever I'd intended to say to him. But what had I intended to say?
“I think we should meet,” I said. “We have things to talk about.”
I don't know what I meant by that or what I would have to say if we did meet. The words just came into my head and I uttered them. I waited for him to be patronizing or insulting. He was neither and so I knew he was afraid.
“Very well,” he said, using a phrase I've read but never heard anyone say before. “When and where?”
He'd refuse if I suggested we meet in Westminster at his place, so I suggested it and he did. How do I, who have never before done anything like this, know how to do it? I said, come to my place instead, and I gave him my address. “Tomorrow evening, seven-thirty?”
He agreed to that and said, “Till then,” in a pleasanter way, and “Good-bye,” in a friendly tone.
I understood why. He had high hopes of me because I'd invited him to my home in the evening. That, in his book, meant I'm willing to sleep with him. He was hoping I'd turn out to be another Hebe, as beautiful and—dare I say it?—as easy.
NEXT DAY WAS Wednesday and I went shopping. If Ivor Tesham was coming to my flat I would have to entertain him. At least get something for him to drink. Whisky, gin, vodka, these were the names that ran through my head, but what if he only drank brandy or Burgundy or beer? It was useless and very wasteful to buy anything. I can't afford it. I drank the last of that bottle of wine after I'd talked to him and I shall make him a cup of tea.
Just as I had cold feet about the available drink, I now had second thoughts about my flat. I doubt if he has ever been anywhere like my flat. It consists of a bed-sitting room, which becomes a kitchen at one end, and the only door apart from the front door leads into the bathroom. There is a table that belonged to my grandmother but was in her sheltered housing living room and isn't the kind of grandmother's table that might be in Ivor Tesham's family, made by Chippendale of course—or did he only make chairs? I have chairs too, the fireside kind with sagging brown seats and wooden arms, and a rug worked by my mother as therapy when she was on medication for depression. My bed can become a sofa, but only does so when someone is visiting because working the mechanism that needs to be set in motion for the conversion to take place is a back-breaking exercise. I used to do it when Hebe visited but haven't since she died. As he was to have tea in lieu of spirits, should I also have let him confront the unmade bed? That he would probably have construed as a further invitation, so I manipulated its hinges and creaking shafts and turned it into a sofa, scattered it tastefully with cushions and massaged my back.
I'd decided by then what I'd say to him. It amused me a bit to think that Hebe's jewelry, the tat as well as the pearls he gave her, were in the kitchen, inside a drawer where I keep the brochures that tell me how to use my minute fridge, baby oven, and mini electric kettle. Perhaps I should ask him if he will confirm that he gave me the pearls when a jeweler rings him up to ask him.
But I knew I wouldn't, because I was quite suddenly overcome with shyness—no, not shyness but fear, real fear. There were three-quarters of an hour to go before he was due and though I'd resolved to do nothing to my appearance and nothing more to the flat—I'd done quite enough—I went into the bathroom and had a shower, washed my hair and blew it dry with great care, sprayed myself with the last of my perfume and put on my only dress, tights, and the highest-heeled shoes I have, which aren't very high. On an impulse I fastened the pearls round my neck, but quickly took them off again. Hebe was always trying to teach me makeup techniques but I didn't pay much attention and now, when I try to do ambitious things to my eyes, it all goes wrong and I have to wipe it off. I ended up with a sprinkling of powder and some carefully applied lipstick.
He was almost due and I knew he would be on time. His job and the kind of life he leads make sure of that. And just as the green digits on the microwave clock changed from 19:29 to 19:30 the doorbell rang. I pressed the key to let him in and heard it buzz downstairs. A great calm
had descended on me and a feeling that nothing mattered anymore.
The photograph in Dod's is a good one. The camera hasn't lied. He is very handsome, if you like that kind of chiseled regularity, the thin mouth, the aquiline nose. I couldn't read his expression, what he thought of me, if he thought anything. He said, “Good evening,” and called me Miss Atherton, which made me wonder if I know anyone else who does that. He is a graceful man and elegant in the dark suit and white shirt I suppose he wore in the House of Commons today. Of course he didn't look me up and down with scorn or amusement, and now I wonder how I could have imagined such behavior. Writers sometimes talk about thoughts coming to you “unbidden” and the thought that came to me then I certainly hadn't looked for. I wondered what it must be like to be the sort of woman who was squired about wherever she went by a man who looked like him and spoke like him.
I asked him to sit down in one of the “fireside” chairs and offered him tea. I was wrong too to think he'd look round my flat incredulously or with contempt. He took it in his stride and the chairs and the tea—only he didn't take the tea. “That's very kind of you but no, thank you,” he said.
What to say to him, how to use this time, maybe half an hour, came to me quite suddenly. I sat down opposite him and said, “You will have been wondering why I asked you here.” Here I made myself pause. “Don't look so worried,” I said, though he didn't. “It's only that I thought you might like something of Hebe's as a keepsake—well, to remember her by.”
He slightly inclined his head. It wasn't quite a nod, more like some one doing what I think is called a court bow. What had he expected me to say? Something about the car and the crash and the gun, I expect. I looked for some sign of relief from him but saw nothing. His color, which is a pale olive, didn't change. I wonder if I am the only person in the world who knows he and Hebe were lovers.
