by Barbara Vine
LETTING MY FLAT was fairly easy. I found a tenant within days of advertising, a woman of about my own age called Pandora Flint. She was the fourth prospective tenant I'd seen. There had been objections on my side or theirs to the other three—two found the place too small for the rent I was asking and the third wanted me to take out my furniture and let her bring hers in—but Pandora seemed all right. She loved the flat and didn't hesitate when I asked her for a deposit and two months' rent in advance. It was a year's lease with an option for renewal she was taking on and that suited both of us. If any problem existed it was that I disliked her on sight.
To look at, she was very much like Hebe. I suppose Hebe's isn't an uncommon type, tall, slim, blond with regular features and long legs. You see them all over the place, two-a-penny, as my mother would say. Hebe had been my friend, so it would have been logical for me to be predisposed to Pandora, but things don't work that way. Hebe had been warm and effusive and demonstrative, a touchy-feely woman; Pandora was cool and distant, with one of those remote whispery voices that sound as if its possessor is just coming out of a trance. None of this mattered to me if she turned out to be a good tenant, as she did. Unfortunately, she was less than perfect in other ways.
I don't know what it was like in other parts of the country but in the district of London where I lived and the district where Gerry lived there were scarcely any waste bins to be found on the streets. Fear of IRA bomb attacks was so great that street bins in which explosives could be placed had all been taken away and so had left-luggage lockers at stations. If I wanted to dispose of Hebe's fetishistic stuff before I moved into Irving Road, I had to do it at once. Unthinkable to take them with me to my new home. I would have to put them into the bag in my own kitchen bin and take the bag down to one of the dustbins that permanently stood outside the front door common to all six flats. The idea of this troubled me a lot. At the beginning of January, the man called Michael in one of the ground-floor flats had rung my bell and, when I answered, held up the small plastic carrier I had put in one of the dustbins ten minutes before. I recognized it at once and was perfectly aware of its contents before he told me.
“I was sure you didn't mean to throw away a Christmas pudding in a basin,” he said, “and a dozen mince pies and a present which hasn't been opened.”
“On the contrary,” I said, “I intended to throw them away and I did. Perhaps you'd be kind enough to put them back where they came from.”
Considering the indignation I felt, not to say anger, I think I'd been very moderate in what I said. Later on I checked the dustbins and neither the carrier nor its contents were there. No doubt, he'd eaten my mother's Christmas pudding and mince pies and given whatever was in the package that my aunt had sent me to his girlfriend. But I dared not risk anything like that happening again, not when you consider what would be in the bag this time. Spiked dog collars and lace-up boots and corselettes aren't the kinds of things you can take to the Oxfam shop. Eventually, the day before I left for Irving Road and when all my stuff was packed in the car ready to go, I went to the luggage shop in Kilburn High Road and bought a sturdy suitcase that locked.
When I got back to the flat the window cleaner had come. He always turns up without warning and needs to go inside the first-floor flats and the two on this floor. Mummy says they used to climb up ladders to reach the windows and, if the inside wanted doing, people cleaned their own. Those days are gone, I tell her, it's a question of health and safety. This window cleaner is called Stu, short for Stuart, I suppose. If he's got a surname I've never heard it. He's coarse and rude and intrusive and once he asked me why I didn't grow my hair. I would look a lot better with long hair, he said in his charming way.
He took an incredibly long time cleaning my three windows and while he was doing it he stared at me a lot. I couldn't start on transferring Hebe's things into my new suitcase while he was there, because he'd see all her kinky stuff and comment on it. I can imagine the kind of thing he'd say, though I'd rather not. So I had to sit about and pretend to read a book. His charges go up every time and we haggled about the cost but he won. He always does.
“I won't be here next time you come,” I said. “There'll be a new lady living here.”
“Lady, is it? Be ten quid to speak to her. Where are you off to, then, Grosvenor Square?”
I didn't answer but said he needn't think he'd seen the last of me. I was just letting the flat as a temporary measure.
“Flat, you call it? I hope the lady knows that what she's getting is a room.”
I hoped he would hand out the same sort of treatment to Pandora. I wouldn't put up with him for a moment if it wasn't that the managing agents of this house employ him, not me. Once he'd gone I drank all the wine left in a bottle I'd started on and dressed myself in some of Hebe's things, the corsets and the fishnet stockings and a see-through top, and looked at myself in the mirror. It would be the last time and, my body throbbing and moist, and not just with sweat, I thought it was just as well I'd be leaving this stuff behind. I turned my back on the mirror, stripped the things off and put them into the case. I laid a blue woolly dressing gown (suitable for a septuagenarian) Mummy had once given me on the top. I locked it, put the key in my bag with my house keys and the case in the only built-in cupboard in the flat. It's between the kitchen cabinets and the bathroom door and it's got four shelves inside it. I laid the case flat on the floor under the bottom shelf and put a roll of carpet cut-off in front of it. Anyone opening the cupboard door wouldn't have known it was there.
I AM LIVING in Irving Road now. As a nanny, I have one day off a week and I take it, but naturally I have to come back here in the evening. I have nowhere else to go. When I go out I tell Gerry I'm meeting Callum. My Sundays are supposed to be free too but I've nowhere to go and anyway I don't want all this time off. I want to be with Justin as much as possible so as to make him like me, or make sure he goes on liking me.
On his third birthday, in March, he got his voice back. “Justin is three,” were the first words he spoke after being silent so long. Then he said, “Jane.”
Though he used not to be interested in me, Gerry has asked me about Callum. What does he do for a living? Are we engaged? I've told him he's a businessman, is thirty-two years old, and has his own flat near Sloane Square. No, we're not engaged, not yet. I think Gerry may be jealous. If he is he will probably be the only man I've ever known who has been. I am going to work on it, tell him things to show it's possible for a man to want me. He has moved back into the bedroom he used to share with Hebe. I, of course, have the smallest bedroom, the boxroom, as Mummy would call it if she ever saw it, which she won't. Any other nanny would expect an en suite bathroom and television. I am not unreasonable, I know Gerry can't put in another bathroom specially for me, but I don't think it would have hurt him or Justin, come to that, to have given me Justin's room and put him in mine. A child of three doesn't need a large bedroom.
When I first came Gerry made it plain without actually saying so that he expected me to spend the evenings in that little cell after Justin had gone to bed. Or perhaps in the kitchen like a maid. Hebe had had a small black-and-white television in there and it was still there, up on a high shelf. He looked surprised that first day when I came into the living room with the book I was reading and sat down quietly in the armchair opposite to him. “Oh, hello,” he said, as if I was the last person likely to walk in.
It wasn't a good beginning but I persevere. He usually puts on the television once the evening meal has been eaten and stares at it in silence. If Justin calls out he tells me to stay where I am and he goes up to him himself. My intention was not to perform any household tasks, but I now see that I must if I want to make myself indispensable. The idea originally was that Justin and I would eat at five and Gerry would get his own supper, make himself a sandwich or scrambled eggs on toast. Now, for the past week, I have been giving Justin his tea and then I cook a meal for Gerry and me. “That's nice,” he said the first time
I did it, and after that he took it for granted.
He is unhappy, I can see that, but still his gloom and misery make me impatient. I can't help it. After all, I know what Hebe was really like. I know how misplaced all this posthumous devotion is. He was no more to her than a meal ticket and not a very superior one at that. Once she had found a better she would have been off. She would have left him a “Dear Gerry” note, taken Justin, the pearls, and her clothes and gone off to a more promising future. If she had lived, would that superior provider have been Ivor Tesham? I think about him a lot. I think about that evening, ten months ago now, when he sent a car to pick her up on the Watford Way. If he ever sent a car, if the car that crashed was the car he sent. “What are you going to do?” he asked me. Well, I'm not going to do anything. Why would I? But it was strange that he asked.
I mentioned the pearls just now. They are upstairs in Gerry's bedroom in their box, side by side with the bangle, the engagement ring, and the locket with Justin's picture in it. Gerry hasn't asked. It's plain he doesn't care. After he has left for work in the mornings and Justin is in the living room playing with his toy cars—he has about a hundred of them and each new one is a cause of excitement. Well, he's a child, so it's only to be expected—I go upstairs, open the drawer, take the lid off the box and look at the pearls. Something strange has happened. I look at them in a different way from the way I did when I had them in my flat. I was greedy for them then, calculating how I could sell them, what the risks were, what would happen if I dared to try it. Now I see them as a kind of nest egg or insurance policy. It's because I know Gerry isn't interested in them. Gerry doesn't care. He wouldn't know if they were there or not. So I think of them as my savings, my pension if you like, something to fall back on when all else fails. Then I shall dare try it. The worst that can happen is that the jeweler will get in touch with Gerry, not Ivor Tesham, and tell Gerry what they are worth, and then he will know what his beloved wife was.
He has begun to talk about her. The evening silence has been broken and he opens his heart to me. This, he says, is because he knows that I too miss her, I too loved her. He has lost his wife, the only woman he ever loved, but I have lost my best friend, someone, incidentally, that I had known for longer than he had.
People in love don't know the object of their love at all. It has taken being here and listening to Gerry's maunderings to show me that. Not having any personal experience of the condition, I had never noticed it before. Gerry has created a Hebe who isn't the Hebe I or anyone else knew and certainly not the Hebe Ivor Tesham knew. It isn't the woman who told me she talked sex-talk on the phone to her lover half an hour after her husband had left for work or the woman who got on a bus to meet her lover dressed only in boots and a long topcoat and fixed up plausible alibis with a compliant friend. This woman is a wonderful wife and devoted mother who never looked at another man—his actual words—in spite of men's attention and her beauty. She desperately wanted another child but agreed with him at once when he said they couldn't afford it. But for having no one to look after Justin, she would have gone out to work. It was he who stopped her, told her not even to think about it.
I listen, I nod, I say, “Really?” I say, “You're right, I know.” That's all he wants, agreement, acceptance, sympathy, and he gets it from me. Once or twice he cries, putting his head in his hands and sobbing over this woman who couldn't have cared less if he had lived or died. Well, except that she might have had to work if he had died and Ivor Tesham hadn't been there to rescue her.
Last evening Gerry said, “I didn't like the idea of you living in, Jane. I couldn't face having another woman living here.” He looked at me, not rudely or particularly critically, but as if I'd be anyone's last resort, the best of a bad job as Mummy would say. “But it's been a good idea. I can say honestly I don't know what I'd do without you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“If you were more like Hebe it would be difficult, but no two women could be more different.” This after he had just been telling me how beautiful she was, how clever, how witty, funny, and such good company. Then he said, “I know I shouldn't be selfish but you won't leave me and get married to Callum, will you?”
“Maybe one day,” I said, “but that's a way off.”
• • •
FAR FROM GERRY'S idealized notion of her, Hebe wasn't a good mother. I now know, though I didn't at the time, that all the Granias and Lucys and the rest of them, not to mention Gerry's mother, were roped in as often as possible to mind him when she went clothes shopping or took herself to the cinema or the hairdresser. She put him to bed as early as she could and left him to cry if he was in bed and she alone with him in the house. I was determined to be an exemplary mother-substitute and I think I am succeeding. It is rather painful for me to remember the spontaneous expressions of affection from him to her, the many times I had seen him go to her, climb on her knee and hug her, sometimes cover her face with his kisses. And it's a mystery to me why a little boy of his age will show so much love to someone who is, let's face it, absolutely unworthy. Hebe didn't deserve Justin's love. I shall deserve it. My hope is that gradually, as time passes, as more and more weeks and months lie between her death and the present, he will forget her and come to think of me as the only mother he has had.
It hasn't started to happen yet but it will. If I am steadfast it will. He still asks for her, especially when he is tired, and it's no longer “Justin wants Mummy” but “I want my mummy” or simply, plaintively, “Where's my mummy?” He is leaving babyhood and becoming a little boy. I hug him when he calls for Hebe, but he becomes petulant and pushes me away. Hebe was a completely insensitive person, totally unaware of other people's feelings, and I am hoping Justin hasn't inherited this trait from her, but it's more than possible he has. Can there be a gene of selfishness? Perhaps. Or it may be that Gerry was right when he said he was selfish and didn't want me to leave him and get married.
Things are going rather well, though, and that's something I don't often say.
14
To understand Ivor you have first to accept him as the quintessential English gentleman. That sounds like a paradox when you know how he behaved over the crash and its aftermath, but really that behavior was quite in character. The English gentleman is brave to the point of fool-hardiness, courteous to women of his own class, a good soldier, arrogant, proud, generous, and bold. He has an old-fashioned sense of honor. Extraordinary as it must appear to a great many people, he is still in that mindset which was the stuff of adventure fiction in the early part of the twentieth century. Carruthers (or Frobisher or Carew) will be blackballed in the morning, so the night before his best friend sends him into the library, where he will find a gun in the third drawer of a certain desk. You will know what to do, the friend says, and Carruthers does. He prefers death to dishonor and he doesn't hesitate.
But he has a weakness. He is very afraid of ridicule. On that Saturday morning, when he first read about the crash, Ivor didn't tell the police about his part in it because he feared the ferocity of the popular press. No one would have blamed him for the accident. No charges would have been brought against him. Only his evident adultery could have been construed by puritans as dishonorable, but English gentlemen don't care for puritans and they commit adultery all the time. After all, the puritans are Roundheads and they are Cavaliers. It wasn't the law but the tabloid newspapers he feared. He feared the destructiveness they would have meted out to him in respect of the sadomasochistic aspect of the thing, the handcuffs, the gag, the hooded kidnappers, and the blacked-out windows of the car. All this would, of course, have been contrasted with their pseudo-sympathy for the Lynch family, for the “loved ones” of Lloyd Freeman, and, above all, for the cuckolded husband of Hebe Furnal. Destructiveness it would have been and it would have gone on and on. Every time he made a speech in the Commons it would have been resurrected.
Later on, it was a different matter. With the Kelly Mason complications, the discovery o
f the gun, and the questioning of Sean Lynch, all possibilities of going to the police were ruled out. It was too late. It was too late to do anything but lie low, but wait and hope.
And so Ivor had suffered many months of acute anxiety. But his fortunes recovered in the spring, coinciding apparently with the affair he had embarked on with Juliet Case. They had become what was being called an “item.” There had even been a photograph of them together in the Evening Standard. That was just after the Gulf War and the air offensive against Iraq began. Ivor had made a statement to the Commons and three days later got himself into the papers again when he spoke with patriotic indignation (as an English gentleman would speak) about the captured allied pilots Iraq had paraded on TV. He abhorred Iraq's action, he fulminated against such “vile exploitation,” but he liked the publicity for himself. That was the kind of press attention he enjoyed.
His reaction to the mortar attack on 10 Downing Street in early February must have been a mix of outrage and the jitters. It was described as the most audacious IRA operation on the UK mainland since the Brighton bombing. All the windows were blown out in the room where the Cabinet was meeting at the time. Ivor was shocked and angry, but I suspect those feelings were subservient to the nervousness he always felt when anything to do with the IRA came up. He would inevitably think of the Sean Lynch connection.
But Iris and I had other things on our minds. Our son had been born on February 20 after a frightening drive to St. Mary's Hospital. A few hundred yards away a bomb had exploded at Paddington Station two days before. Hoax bomb-warning calls led to station closures, closed-off streets, and traffic hold-ups. Because of this we nearly didn't make it and Iris feared she might give birth in the car, but all was just about well and it was a midwife's hands, not mine, that delivered him. He was a big boy, four kilos (or eight and a half pounds, as we fuddy-duddies say) and within the hour we had named him Adam James.
