by Barbara Vine
“Would you like to take me on as Justin's nanny?”
He didn't hear me the first time, or pretended he hadn't. “What?”
“Would you like me to be Justin's nanny? As a job, I mean.”
“You?” he said. “You wouldn't want to, would you? What about your own work?”
“I've lost my job,” I said, seeing no reason not to be honest.
“But you've had no training.”
“The ones you interviewed had and much good it did them.”
He smiled a little at that. He got up and turned the television off. Justin helped things by snuggling up closer to me and closing his eyes.
“If I agreed to it, how would we arrange things? You'd come here every morning at eight, say, and go home again when I got home?”
Charming. He couldn't have made it clearer how he felt about me. “That wouldn't work at all well,” I said. “I'd have to live here. I'll have no other home, because I'd have to let my flat. Think how useful it would be, having a nanny with a car. I'd have my own room. I wouldn't get in your way.”
“Oh, Jane, I didn't mean—”
Yes, you did. “Think about it,” I said, “but don't think too long. I'll take Justin up to bed now.”
I went upstairs with him in my arms and laid him in his father's bed, not bothering to undress him. Then I put the pearls back where Hebe's other jewelry was. I wasn't losing them, after all, they'd still be near me, because I'd be working here. At the bottom of the drawer, at the back, was something I hadn't noticed before. It was a cutting from a newspaper inside a clear plastic envelope, a photograph of Ivor Tesham after he won his Morningford seat in 1988. I put it in my jacket pocket. Before I went downstairs I kissed Justin, rehearsing, I suppose, for my role as his nanny.
Gerry said when I came in, “I'm very grateful. Thank you. Of course it would be on a trial basis.”
“A one-week trial,” I said. “I need to know for sure. I shall need to let my flat. And now we'd better talk about money.”
12
When I began writing this I said I'd avoid politics as far as I could, but some political matters have to be mentioned. The by-election to fill the seat vacated by a Conservative MP's death was one of them and Ivor went up to his Suffolk constituency the weekend before to support the candidate. It wasn't he but someone else whose name I've forgotten who lost the seat by declaring that voting for anyone but the Tory candidate would be a triumph for IRA terrorism. The result of that was a victory for the Liberal Democrats. The electorate are wayward and capricious and don't care for being bullied. That much politics I do know. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth (as Bible-orientated Sandy might have said) among the Tories, who were beginning to see the increasing likelihood of the Labour Party getting in at the next general election, which was not much more than a year away. Even Ivor was worried about it, temporarily distracted from his personal concerns. He hadn't yet got in touch with Juliet Case, though he did so in the week following the by-election. Iris and I knew nothing about this. We had never heard of Juliet Case at this time and were beginning to think that he was settling down to some sort of acceptance of the status quo. No one but, presumably, Mrs. Lynch and her son Sean and perhaps a few relatives knew what condition Dermot Lynch was in, but we supposed that if he was still in a coma after eight months the chances were that he would never come out of it. In fact, Dermot was by this time at home in Paddington with his mother and brother. He had come out of the hospital two days after Ivor saw Juliet leave William Cross Court and followed her home.
Although he knew nothing about it at the time, this marked a turnaround in Ivor's fortunes. And when he did know, and knew the condition Dermot Lynch was in, things began to go better for him. He had aged in the preceding months and got very thin. One day in January, when I was having a drink with him in the Commons and he'd gone off to vote, a Lib Dem I knew slightly came up to me and asked me if my brother-in-law had cancer. He didn't put it quite like that but that was what he meant. From the moment (from the day, rather) Ivor found out about Dermot, his health and appearance improved and this in spite of his working harder at this point than he'd ever worked in his life.
What had happened was that he'd phoned Juliet Case, told her he'd met Lloyd a few times but only learned of her existence very recently. He owed Lloyd a sum of money he had believed he would never now be able to repay but thought it right that she should have it. How much screwing up of his courage this took, he didn't say. For some reason he expected a sharp rejoinder but she was, to use his own word, “charming.” She had a beautiful voice and he wasn't surprised to know she had been to RADA. She invited him to her home but, being reluctant to make his way up to “darkest Queen's Park” again, as he put it, he asked her to have dinner with him. Iris says that this was always Ivor's answer to any problem with a woman. He asked her out to dinner.
NOW, OF COURSE, I don't know exactly what they said to each other in that restaurant. I only know what Ivor told me, what he necessarily précised for me. So I have constructed their conversation from what he said and my knowledge of him (and later on of Juliet), but I think it's accurate enough. I did know Ivor very well and this is pretty much how it would have been.
By this time, apparently, he had forgotten that she had seen him before. When he had come away from her front door after checking the doorbells, he had seen her looking at him out of her front window. But, as I say, he'd forgotten, and he was surprised when she recognized him immediately. He had only just come into the restaurant himself and was giving his name to the girl who kept the bookings list when Juliet came up to him, held out her hand, and said, “Juliet Case.”
Then he did remember but he said nothing about their previous encounter. He was, he said, admiring her. He wondered how he could ever in his own mind have labeled her “big.” She had a perfect figure, an hourglass figure. The plain black dress, decorously calf-length but startlingly low-cut, he said, was just right. The ankles, which he'd remarked on while he was following her half across London, looked even finer and more delicate this evening. He could easily make a fetish of those ankles, he said, and knowing enough about Ivor and fetishes, I had no doubt of it. Her thick black curls were piled high on her head but she was very lightly made-up, her fine dark eyes as nature formed them, and she wore no jewelry but pearl earrings.
Those earrings reminded him of the pearls he had given Hebe, an act of generosity he now regretted. She asked for a dry martini and Ivor had one too, though he was well known for never drinking the stuff except when he was in New York and could have it in the Oak Room at the no longer extant Plaza Hotel. He had come to hand over a check for a thousand pounds, which, now he was sitting opposite her and admiring her attractions, he was finding rather difficult to do. They had been talking of Aaron Hunter, the subject of her ex-husband having been raised by Juliet, who asked Ivor if they had met while appearing on the same television program. She had seen it and was now struck by the coincidence. Had Ivor seen him in his new play, a revival of O'Neill's Anna Christie? Ivor hadn't, and he apparently had to restrain himself from asking her if she'd come and see it with him. But that would have been premature. He had to get this business of the money over first and get over as well the delicate business of asking her about Dermot Lynch. That, after all, was the purpose of their being there. She was so friendly, so charming, and—well, sweet, that he wondered if he was going to be able to do it at all. But he was getting used to doing difficult awkward things, as a minister has to be. He took the check in its envelope out of his pocket and handed it to her.
“I want you to have this. It's what I owed Lloyd.”
He had rather hoped she wouldn't open it then and there but she did. She looked at the check, lifted her eyes to him and said quite slowly, “But you only owed him a quarter of this.”
Those words told him she knew Lloyd had been employed by him on the night of the crash. Two hundred and fifty pounds was the remaining sum to be paid on completion of the
mock kidnap. When she said that, Ivor had a quick and vivid picture of himself scooping up the two envelopes from our hall table when Hebe hadn't come. For a moment he said nothing. He was thinking that if she knew about the payment, what else must she know? Everything, surely. And then, quietly and with a small smile, she confirmed his fears.
“Lloyd told me what you were paying him to do. It looked easy. It would have been but for Dermot's driving. I think I ought to tell you that Lloyd and I were still on—well, friendly terms, but we'd split up, we'd not much feeling for each other anymore. I'm not saying I hadn't loved him once or I wasn't sad when he died, but I couldn't say it devastated me.”
Ivor was only interested in how this affected him. That was natural. “You know all about that night? About how they were supposed to bring her—Hebe—to me?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And you knew how they were meant to pick up Hebe Furnal and not Kelly Mason?”
“Yes. You're going to ask why I didn't go to the police.”
“You could ask me that,” Ivor said.
“If it had been Lloyd who was injured and Dermot who was dead I would have, I'd have wanted to—well, clear him of blame. But Lloyd was dead. And Dermot was unconscious and couldn't speak. I thought that if I said it was a sort of game they wouldn't believe me and, you see …” Here she hesitated, then said quickly, “Lloyd never told me your name.”
Ivor felt as if he'd been struck a heavy blow. It rocked him. “What?”
“Please don't be cross. It's true. He never told me your name and I never asked.”
“Oh, God,” Ivor said and then, “I won't be cross.”
“Lloyd came over in the morning that Friday to pick up some of his stuff he'd left in my house. He was renting a flat somewhere. He owed me some money—just the amount you owed him. He gave it to me and said this MP Nicola Ross had introduced him to was paying him to pick up a girl, put handcuffs and a gag on her, and take her to a house in Hampstead. The girl would know it was just a game, and he was going to get five hundred pounds for it. I could have asked what MP but I didn't. I wasn't really interested. I just thought it was good money for doing very little, and then Lloyd and I talked about other things.”
“So you'd never have known who I was if I hadn't told you on the phone.”
She smiled. “That's right.”
He knew he had betrayed himself. “What are you going to do?” It was the same question he had asked Jane Atherton and he got much the same answer.
“Do? I don't understand.”
I don't know if there was a long silence after that but it was long enough for Ivor to consider his position, as employers are supposed to say when they're about to give someone the sack. Next day he was due to speak in the Commons on a new aircraft that had just been perfected with a view to its use in the Middle East, should war come. He imagined the police arriving—would they be permitted to enter the department and find him in his office?—and he still being obliged to make the speech, knowing he would be arrested when he left the chamber.
“I made up my mind in those few moments that I'd kill myself,” he said when he told me.
“Don't be ridiculous,” I said.
“No, really. Not possessing a handgun like all those bloody Americans do, I thought I'd hang myself. At home, of course, not in the department.” He gave one of his wild laughs, laid a hand on my arm. “Don't look like that, Rob. It never had to happen.”
He wanted to ask her if she was going to blackmail him or try to blackmail him, but he couldn't bring himself to say the words. A waiter came to their table. Juliet gave him her order and Ivor, though he felt he couldn't eat a thing, said he'd have the same. Drinking wasn't beyond him, though, and he ordered a bottle of wine without asking her what she'd like. When the waiter had gone he looked at her in despair, his head full of suicide plans. When she had told him her intentions, he thought, he would pay the bill, perhaps empty his pockets and simply put all the money he had on the table, get up and leave. He'd go home, drink half a bottle of whisky, and do the deed, trying not to think about it too much beforehand.
“He's such a drama queen,” Iris said when I told her. “What's the masculine for diva?”
“It didn't come to that, anyway,” I said. “Of course it didn't. She just said she wasn't going to do anything. It wasn't her business. It was in the past and telling the police or the media wouldn't serve any useful purpose.”
“I imagine he could hardly believe his ears. The trouble with Ivor is he always—well, nearly always—believes the worst of people even when he doesn't know them. Juliet sounds rather nice.”
“She was very nice to Ivor.”
He found he could eat his dinner after all. The wine he had ordered to drown his sorrows or help him on his way to his death now became a celebration drink. Everything was going to be all right. A small setback came while they were eating their main course. It was a case of the good news and the bad news, only neither of them put it like that. The bad news, Ivor said, was that she told him Dermot Lynch had come home, the good that he had no memory of the crash or what had led up to it. Lloyd had told her Dermot was to drive the pick-up car and the two of them had met a couple of times after the Victoria pub meeting and before the birthday present evening. A few weeks after the crash she, Juliet, had gone to see Mrs. Lynch, solely, it appeared, because she felt sorry for her, and since then had visited her every so often but had never told her about the MP and the kidnap setup. What would have been the point?
“You mean, you went to see her just out of the kindness of your heart?”
“It was no big deal,” she said. “Three stops on the tube. She's a very gentle, simple sort of woman. She's had a lot to put up with. Sean being questioned like that about Sandy Caxton's murder and now Dermot. He'll never be quite right, you know.”
Ivor asked her what that meant.
“He had a lot of brain damage. He can move around and talk a bit and so on, I've seen him, but he'll never work again. Look, it wasn't your fault. It was his. It was he who drove through a red light, not the lorry driver. And he took the gun along. Sean told me. Sean brought the gun back from a package tour to Poland before the Soviets went. Someone sold it to him for a few dollars.”
It was that simple. Sean Lynch hadn't had access to some secret IRA store of firearms. His brother had “borrowed” a souvenir of a foreign trip to give appropriate color to a mock hijack. Ivor imagined them laughing about it together. He had a heady feeling of everything at last going his way. It was over, he thought, forgetting he had felt that way before. Of course there still remained things for him to do. One must be to compensate the Lynch family. He must find a way of paying some sort of pension to Philomena Lynch or perhaps to her son who would never work again. It would be tricky but it could be done. And there was no longer any need for him to obey my injunction not to go near the Lynch family, for both he and Sean Lynch were innocent of any wrongdoing. I think Ivor genuinely believed by this time that he had done nothing wrong as he basked in the sweet smiles of Juliet Case, contemplated her cleavage, and thought about those ankles, at that time invisible under the table, with no wider a span, he said poetically, than the silver ring his napkin had come in.
Surely with extreme exaggeration, he said she was the only woman he had ever taken out to dinner who thanked him. Perhaps he had forgotten that Hebe hadn't had the chance to thank him as they had never had a meal together. He took Juliet home in a taxi and she invited him in for a drink. A character in Shakespeare says, “Our courteous Antony, whom ne'er the word of ‘No' woman heard speak.” That was Ivor. At any rate, no woman as attractive as Juliet Case had ever heard him say no. It was already eleven, he had a heavy day ahead of him with an important speech to make, but he didn't hesitate. The inevitable happened—inevitable with Ivor, that is, I don't know about her. He didn't stay the night, though, but left at two and was lucky enough to find a taxi at Queen's Park station.
He told us this very discre
etly but there was no doubt what he meant. Juliet Case, who had been Lloyd Freeman's girlfriend, had slept with him the first time they met.
“But there you are,” he said airily. “My luck's come back.”
Next morning he sent her two dozen red roses with the always irresistible message that carries an undercurrent of breathless urgency: When can I see you again?
What answer she made I don't know but he did see her again and again and again. Soon Ivor was in the middle of a full-blown affair with Juliet Case. We nearly quarreled, he and I, when he said he wished, instead of parting with them to Hebe, who hadn't lived to enjoy them, he'd held on to those pearls and given them to Juliet. I told him he was a callous shit, but he was too pleased with himself and her to care.
13
After all your education,” my mother said. “A sixteen-year-old with no O levels could do that.”
I asked her if it wasn't better for a child to be looked after by an educated woman than by someone who was ignorant of everything but pop music and clothes, but all she said was, a frequent rejoinder, “Oh, you know what I mean.”
It was plain that Gerry didn't want me. He especially didn't want me living in his house. But he needed a nanny for Justin, and Justin, who hadn't liked Grania or Lucy or Emily or the nameless one—whose name, I discovered, was Wendy—seemed now to like me. Second only to Gerry himself, he liked me. This was a mark in my favor in more ways than one. If you were getting married, wouldn't you prefer someone your child liked?
