The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  “I think you must be mad!”

  Ivor shrugged. “Wait till you hear the rest of it.”

  “It can't get any worse, that's for sure.”

  Juliet said to him that Dermot was living on some government allowance which is now called Invalidity Benefit but had a different name then. He would never work again. His mother went out cleaning. Sean was a builder's laborer but the work wasn't regular, it was sporadic, and often there was none at all. It was this that changed Ivor's mind for him. Or so he said. Well, he was an English gentleman and English gentlemen are good to the poor. They perform charitable acts to the lower orders and hand out eleemosynary alms.

  “I suppose I ought to do something for them,” he said.

  Juliet thought he ought. “I hoped you would say that,” she said.

  Next day, she phoned Mrs. Lynch and the two of them went over to William Cross Court. Ivor must have noted the contrast between this visit and his last. Then he had skulked about on the stairs, hiding from observers; now he went as a prospective honored guest. It was the end of July and the beginning of the parliamentary summer recess. William Cross Court, which he had in his mind labeled a dump, looked rather nice in the sunshine, flowers on some of the balconies and more in Westminster Council's neat flowerbeds. The lawns were bright green, with not a weed showing.

  “I suppose you thought,” Iris said, “that made it all respectable.”

  “As a matter of fact that's exactly what I did think.”

  It was at this point that I wondered what would have happened if I hadn't seen him and Juliet walking along Warwick Avenue that evening. If, for instance, I hadn't spent two minutes leaning on that railing and admiring the canal and the lights. Would he ever have told us? Would he have changed his mind about having something “I may as well tell you,” said nothing of this visit and subsequent visits to the Lynches' until disaster came—if disaster was to come? I think so. But I had lingered and I had seen him and now it was all coming out.

  Sean Lynch opened the front door. Ivor said he couldn't believe his eyes when this man—this bricklayer or whatever he was, this one-time criminal, this suspect in his friend's murder—put his hand on Juliet's shoulder and kissed her on the cheek.

  “It took a bit of getting used to, that,” he said, and then, oddly, “Of course, things are different now. I somehow thought he'd call her ‘Miss Case.' I thought they'd all be tremendously respectful.”

  “When are you going to start living in the real world, Ivor?” Iris was furious. “These people are probably planning just how they're going to blackmail you.”

  “No,” he said in a vague, dreamy sort of way. “No, they're not. It's not like that. Philomena was rather awestruck. I suppose you'd call that respectful. She kept saying she couldn't believe I was actually in her flat. An MP, she kept saying, a Minister of the Crown.”

  “Oh, my God,” Iris said. “I don't believe it. I'll wake up in a minute.”

  “It was horrible,” he said, “seeing Dermot. I remember him as a very lively, jolly sort of chap, the sort of man who'd be dumb if he lost the use of his hands. He was always gesticulating, holding his hands up, clapping, flicking his fingers. He never moves them now. He can walk—shuffle, rather. His speech is like—well, you know what a Dalek sounds like. Or a zombie. Juliet told me afterward that whole areas of his brain are gone, just lost.”

  Mrs. Lynch had given them tea that first time and a cake she said was “Mr Kipling.” She talked a lot about Mr. Kipling cakes and how good they were, though not a patch on something called Kunzle cakes, which were in vogue when she was a girl. Sean kept telling her to give it a rest, no one was interested, and what would Mr. Tesham think of her. They were still calling him Mr. Tesham then, though that changed on his next visit. Dermot had a towel tied round his neck to protect his clothes while he ate his cake. He got chocolate icing all over his face and Philomena had to fetch a wet flannel to clean him up. He appeared not to recognize Ivor, which was something of a relief. On the way there Ivor had worried about that, imagining him jumping up, the scales falling from his eyes, and presumably too his mind, as he denounced the author of all his sufferings. Eating his cake and drinking his cup of mahogany-colored tea, Ivor saw—with very real pity and horror, I believe—that Dermot was beyond all that; Dermot was in a different world, a place of shadows and incomprehension and oblivion.

  As for Sean, Ivor confessed that he had never before come across anyone like him. It was unusual for him to be frank about his own lack of experience in any aspect of life. There was no question from the start, he said, of taking him for other than what he was, for he exuded menace, he radiated ruthlessness, he would be a good person to have on one's side if one were in trouble.

  “And you think he's on yours,” I said.

  “Some of the things he said made me believe so.”

  Iris made that sound that is usually written “Huh.” “What about the other things? The menace, for instance?”

  “That wasn't directed at me. I'd arranged with Juliet that I wouldn't mention money that first time. All I said was that I'd like to do something for them and that I'd come back and we'd talk about it.”

  He went back two days later but without Juliet this time. The arrangement he'd made was for six in the evening and he took a bottle of champagne with him. While Iris was asking him why and where did he get his crazy ideas from, I was thinking of the champagne he'd left in our fridge on the night of the birthday present. Ivor was a great one for champagne. Once I heard him refer to it as “the drink that is never wrong” or TDTINW. I think he saw it as the panacea for all ills, the smoother-out of all difficulties, the breaker of all possible kinds of ice. And, of course, the bringer of desire and stimulus to the libido.

  Again it was Sean who opened the door. “Mr. Tesham” was dropped and he greeted him as “Ivor.” “How are you doing, Ivor?” were his words. But instead of according the champagne as enthusiastic a welcome, he said in a repressive tone that he didn't drink. Never had, didn't like the taste. Anything alcoholic was out of the question for Dermot, but Ivor opened the champagne (elegantly, I expect, as he always did, without spilling a drop) and he and Philomena Lynch settled down to drink it. Out of pottery mugs. There were no glasses in the place, not even the water kind. No one ever drank water or, come to that, fruit juice, or anything but tea.

  The room they sat in was crowded with shabby chairs, an ancient sagging sofa, and a table big enough for somewhere twice the size. But you barely noticed that. What you noticed was the religious bric-à-brac, the crucifixes and icons—Ivor called them icons—the Sacred Heart of Jesus bleeding in Mary's hands, the face distorted with agony underneath the crown of thorns, the figurine of the Virgin holding the blessed child. There was a superfluity of them and they oppressed Ivor. He hadn't noticed them so much on his previous visit and he didn't on subsequent visits, but that particular time he needed the champagne to offset them, to escape their accusation. This may in part have been due also to the presence of Dermot shuffling about the room, his lusterless eyes wandering from statuette to crucifix, until they came to rest on a framed picture of a pallid-faced woman with a veil covering her hair. He stood in front of this picture, staring, his mouth working, possibly in prayer.

  “Talking to St. Rita,” Philomena said in an admiring tone. “Dermot has a real devotion to St. Rita.”

  Sean cast up his eyes and, behind his mother's back, mimed the playing of a dirge on a violin. Ivor poured more champagne and got on with what he had come about. When he got home, or probably when he next went into the Commons library, he looked up St. Rita and found she was the patron saint of lost causes. She had suffered all her life from a chronic illness and was known in Spain, where she came from, as la abogada de imposibles, the saint of desperate cases. It seemed appropriate.

  If the true reason for the offer he was about to make was to ward off blackmail, Ivor had no intention of even hinting at that. And perhaps that wasn't the reason. It really was fro
m friendship—and pity. He didn't mention that either. Instead he said Dermot had serviced his car over such a long period (actually it was three years and how many times do you have a car serviced in three years when you only use it at weekends?) and had been so thorough and efficient, so pleasant and so insistent on always returning the car himself, that he felt they had become friends. It must have cost him something to say that, in that place and in that company, with big rough Sean, red-faced like the drinker he wasn't, wearing a dirty white singlet and khaki shorts, his greasy yellow hair down on his shoulders, making faces behind his mother's back. But he did say it. He said he felt he had a duty to that friendship to make Dermot and his family's life easier. Therefore he hoped they'd accept an allowance of ten thousand a year.

  17

  There was no argument. Ivor had supposed there would be some polite demur, some disclaimer. “Oh, we couldn't possibly take it,” or “That's far too generous.” Something like that. The trouble was he didn't know his audience. He didn't know people like the Lynches, people from their social stratum, their background, their financial condition. He might be an MP and a minister but he had no idea that men and women existed whose whole life, for some of them from early childhood and certainly to the grave, was a struggle for subsistence, a struggle to get money, to live with some dignity. Not a lot of money, not even enough money, but sufficient to possess some of the things he took absolutely for granted: warmth in winter, an occasional holiday, a television set; not a new car, not that, but an old banger or a motorbike. He ought to have known. He was involved in public life, he had canvassed for election, he had talked to teenage mothers with babies in their arms, to pensioners in slippers, to the unemployed on benefit. But he had done so on doorsteps for two minutes at a time.

  So he was surprised and perhaps a little piqued (though he didn't say so) that the only rejoinder he got was a nod from Sean and a “Right,” and from Philomena, “That would be a help,” though she looked, not at him, but at one of her figurines, as if a plaster saint—truly, a saint made from plaster—was responsible for this largesse. He was disappointed. Like my daughter Nadine, bestowing the first Christmas present she had ever given, he expected extravagant gratitude, repeated thanks. She was three and a half and she got it, but all he got was an apparently indifferent acceptance.

  He asked Philomena for her bank details. Oh, Ivor, Ivor, did you? Did you really do that? She didn't know what he meant. She had never had a bank account. Nor had Sean. However, she had a Post Office savings account and it was into this that he arranged to pay the ten thousand each year on September 1.

  “Yet you go on seeing them,” Iris said. “Is that necessary?”

  “I don't want them to think I'm paying them off. It's a bit awkward, isn't it? Sean knows, you see. I've told you that. He knows I set the whole thing up. It wouldn't do to make him think I was paying him because he constituted a threat to me.”

  “Well, aren't you?”

  “Absolutely not, Iris. They think it's done out of friendship and they're right. As a matter of fact, Sean regards me as a friend now. His girlfriend was there when Juliet and I went round the night you saw us and Sean introduced me as his friend. ‘This is my friend Ivor,' he said.”

  “Right. You're his friend. You meet him for a drink, do you? You have him in the Commons for lunch? You and Juliet and Sean and his girlfriend have dinner together? I don't think so.” Iris was looking at him the way I've never seen her look at him before, with an exasperation which wasn't at all amused. “I said I think you've gone mad and I do. This man's got a criminal record. Do you know what for? You say he's some sort of laborer, but does he ever work? Or is his work petty crime?” They were near to quarreling and, though they sparred, they never quarreled. She changed tack a little. “Can you afford ten thousand a year?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I promised, so I have to.”

  Whether he really could at that time I don't know. Ten thousand was a lot more in 1992 than it is now. But he certainly could afford it by the spring of 1993. His and Iris's father died. John Tesham and I had never seen eye to eye on a lot of things, but I liked him in spite of our differences and I specially liked his manner with our children, his sweetness to them and his patience. He had gone out for a walk with his dogs, no doubt along those lanes, or lanes like them, where I had so much enjoyed walking and carrying my daughter, on a fine day in late April when the trees were in new leaf. The dogs came back without him and led his wife and a neighbor to a spot in the churchyard where he lay dead among the cowslips.

  Ivor made a stirring speech at his funeral, praising him for all sorts of things I never knew he had, devotion to the Church of England, a love of the poetry of Thomas Hardy, and a tenderness toward animals, among others. That last surprised me, as I remembered the hecatombs of pheasants and partridges he shot every winter. Ivor called him “one of the last of the English squires” and even referred to him as the lord of the manor. There was a reading of the will afterward, something which I, though I'm an accountant, didn't know still happened. John Tesham left Ramburgh House to his wife in trust for her lifetime and a considerable income, fifty thousand to his daughter, Iris, and twice that in trust till they were twenty-one to each of his grandchildren. Everything else went to Ivor and it was such a large sum that even I, who am used to dealing with large sums (mostly other people's), was surprised.

  Ten thousand a year would be peanuts to him in the future. He was too much of the English gentleman to give a sign that this fortune which had come to him—huge even after inheritance tax—was any consolation for his loss. We had all driven up to Norfolk together and he talked most of the way back about his father's virtues and his own sorrow. It was at least a month and the third anniversary of Hebe's death was past, before he mentioned, almost in passing, that “now I can afford it” he meant to buy a house in London. The move he had earlier envisaged when he parked his car in our garage would be to another, larger flat, but now a house in Westminster was a possibility.

  Juliet was still living in her flat, her half a house, in Park Road, Queen's Park. She spent her weekends at Ivor's in Old Pye Street, though as far as I know, he never spent his in Park Road. He would never have said so, but I think he would have considered it infra dig to have been seen to be staying in that part of London, he a Minister of the Crown (as Philomena Lynch repeatedly referred to him with pride), he an MP who was also becoming a television personality. He had been interviewed by David Frost and had held his own. Presenters of political panel programs sought him out. His was a recognizable face and not, in his view, permitted to be recognized by the denizens of Kensal Green borders when nipping down to Salusbury Road to pick up a taxi.

  Yet there was no sign of Juliet moving in with him. His flat was on the market and one of those professional house-hunters was—well, hunting for a house for him. Such people take 3 percent of the purchase price and Ivor expected to enrich this man by forty thousand pounds.

  “I haven't the time to mess about with estate agents and orders to view,” he said.

  What did Juliet live on? She never worked. Today, with the cult of the celebrity at its height, some of the glamour that was beginning to attach to him would have rubbed off on her and she might have been one of those good-looking women who become famous for doing nothing. For just being and for being a well-known man's girlfriend. But society hadn't then reached that stage. Her going about with Ivor certainly wouldn't have helped her get parts in the theater—if she was even trying to get parts. She dressed very well. Gone were the patchwork skirts and the ethnic bangles. She had grown her hair long and always, when we saw her, wore it up and done in such a smooth yet intricate way as to make me, and more significantly Iris, think she must be at the hairdresser's three times a week. Ivor, we decided, must be giving her some sort of allowance, and we were old-fashioned enough, though Iris was only two years her senior, to feel there was something distasteful about a man supporting a woman who was not his wife, was not even
what was just beginning to be called his partner.

  But we didn't know. We couldn't ask and wouldn't. It wasn't our business and we both liked Juliet, her apparent frank openness, her obvious affection for Ivor, her charm, so necessary to a woman with her name. But our puzzlement at her behavior was still there: how could she have so readily taken up with Ivor when, however you looked at it, it was he who had caused her former boyfriend's death? Or to put it slightly more accurately, without Ivor's birthday present scenario, her ex-boyfriend—and how ex had he been?— would still be alive.

  She knew all about it, every detail, from the request and offer to Lloyd and Dermot to the crash, through the kidnap, the police and press misapprehension, Dermot's terrible injuries and, possibly though not certainly, the questioning by the police of Sean Lynch over Sandy Caxton's death.

  A strange and rather unwelcome thought came to me one night, in the small hours. I had got up to see to Adam, who was crying. A bad dream had wakened him. What kind of nightmare does a happy two-year-old have that wakes him screaming, calling in desperate fear for his mother and father? He couldn't tell me, so I sat with him, his hand in mine, until he went to sleep, and when I made my way back to our bedroom I thought suddenly, she knows but she tells no one, she never will. Does he pay her to keep silent?

  In the morning I talked about it with Iris. “There's a kind of blackmail,” I said, “where no threat need ever be made, where you might say the reverse of a threat is made, so that she says to him, ‘You know I'll never say a word.' But the knowledge is there. He knows that she knows even if she never mentions it again. So he puts her under an obligation to him by giving her—what? Twice what he's giving the Lynches? She'll never say a word because she won't want to lose this generous allowance, though nothing has ever been said between them about why he gives it to her.”