The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  “Daddy goes out quite a lot in the evenings now,” I said. “He can't stay in with you all the time. You'll have to get used to it.”

  I admit this wasn't doing Gerry any favors, but I resent the fact that after all I have done for him and after all Gerry hasn't done, Justin is still obsessed with his father and doesn't treat me as his new mother, as I hoped would happen. I don't know why not and going to this primary school hasn't improved matters. He cries when he gets there and cries when he sees me waiting for him at the school gates, but I can't tell him that's not logical behavior, because he doesn't understand. He doesn't even try to understand.

  I took him back to bed, telling him it was no good sitting up for Gerry as he wouldn't be home for hours. He wasn't. In fact, I had gone to bed, though I was still awake, lying there in the dark. When I checked the time I saw it was after two. Where can you go in West Hendon till two o'clock in the morning? It beats me. When I used to tell him I was out with Callum I could never think of a place we might have been.

  Ivor Tesham has moved house. There was nothing about this in the papers—of course there wasn't, it's hardly news—but I saw about it in one of those color supplements, the property section. It's a beautiful house, somewhere in Westminster, the kind of place only the very rich can afford, and it makes me wonder where he gets his money from. His father died a few months ago, I saw the death notice, and a bit about him leaving a son and a daughter, Ivor and Iris, so I expect Ivor got the lion's share of the money. In the magazine photograph he's standing in front of the house on the steps leading up to the front door and Carmen is with him in a black suit that's a wee bit too tight for her and on her feet she's got what Hebe once told me were called “fuck me” shoes. That's the sort of thing he'd like. It's all of a piece with the mask and the dog collar and the sex toys.

  The picture I cut out and gummed into the scrapbook. I wonder why I keep it and why I keep on adding to it. I suppose I think it will come in useful one day. Mummy once said to me that keeping a scrapbook is a sign of mental disturbance in an adult.

  ALL THE TIME I've been in Irving Road I haven't had a holiday. I could have—I will say for Gerry that he's not a slave driver—but I didn't know where to go, let alone who to go with. When I worked at the library I had a few people who could just about be called friends and one of them would probably have come with me, but once I left they drifted away. The truth is that none of them bothered to keep up with me. No doubt they have found more amusing company. Well, if it isn't a holiday, the time has come when I have had to take two weeks off. Mummy is ill—well, not really ill. She's had a hysterectomy and she had to have someone with her when she came out of hospital. Gerry didn't make a murmur. He said that now Justin was at school the two of them would be fine. One of the girls, Grania or Wendy, would be happy to come in. He is such an ungracious man, he seemed glad to see the back of me.

  I got to my mother's house a day ahead of her discharge and I must say I quite enjoyed my day and night alone there. It was quite different without her, quiet and restful. While she was always bustling about and handing out gratuitous advice, I had never much liked the place, but appreciating my solitude in the kind of attractive surroundings I am not used to, I started thinking how happy I could be there if she never came home. If it was mine, if I had inherited it. But of course she did come home. I fetched her next morning.

  She made the most appalling fuss about herself. A very nice and highly efficient nurse had assured me she wouldn't be in any pain, just very tired. I mustn't let her lift anything heavy. Well, there was no problem with that. Mummy didn't try to lift anything, barely even a teacup. She sat down all day with her feet up and complained that she had backache and a headache and said she felt as if all her insides had been scooped out, her words, not mine. All my pleasure in being in that house was destroyed and I actually began to look forward to the return to Irving Road.

  I had left Gerry her phone number but he didn't call, not once. I was determined not to bicker with Mummy and I kept to that, just smiling and saying nothing when she began saying pro vocative things, but after I'd been there ten days, exercising an iron control, I could stand it no longer, I shouted back and we had a terrible row.

  It started with her asking about my job and she prefaced that by saying she hadn't mentioned it before, she thought it would be more tactful to wait a few days, but she couldn't restrain herself any longer. She was worried about me. If I really wanted to be a nanny, wouldn't it be best to do a proper training course? There was something called a Norland nanny. Did that mean you went to a place called Norland? If they charged she would pay. I was furious. Wasn't I old enough to make my own decisions in life? If she wanted to spend money on me she could give me a lump sum out of what my father had left.

  “After three years at a good university,” she said, “you shouldn't be in a position to have to ask for money from an elderly woman who has barely enough to live on.”

  I can't stand that kind of irrational argument. She had barely enough to live on but she had got eighty thousand pounds for that flat in Spain and said she could afford to pay nanny-training fees for me. I reminded her that I had given up my holiday to come and look after her. She said she hadn't asked me, only told me about her hysterectomy; her friend next door would have been happy to come in twice a day. This developed into a slanging match; she was totally unreasonable, and it ended with my saying I was leaving. I had been there ten days anyway. Doing my best to behave in a civilized manner, I went next door and told the neighbor (an enormously fat woman with a perpetual grin) that I was going next day and would she be kind enough to look in and attend to Mummy's wants.

  NO ONE WAS there to answer the phone when I called Gerry. I left a message to say I would be back next morning. At four in the afternoon the house was empty. One of the girls or Gerry's mother would have fetched Justin from school. Or so I thought. It was half past seven when they came home, long past Justin's bedtime, or what his bedtime would be if I had any say in the matter. I had shopped on the way home, which was just as well, as there was almost no food in the place, so I was able to manage a meal for both of them.

  Before they came I had been all over the house, fearing I would find a mess, Gerry being hopeless at housework and even at basic tidying up. But everywhere was quite neat and clean. Bathrooms are always a giveaway but our sink had been wiped over after the last person washed his hands in it and the bath had been rinsed. The towels didn't look too dirty, the way they were when I first came and Grania (or Lucy or Wendy) had been in charge. I went into Gerry's bedroom and was very surprised to see the bed had been made. Men seldom make beds. They don't see the point, unless some woman is there to nag them into it.

  I opened the drawer where Hebe's remaining jewelry was. I was almost sure that when I last looked in there—I often did so to check on the pearls—the locket, engagement ring, and bangle had been in their silver-colored cardboard box on top and the old perfume box with the pearls in it underneath. “Almost.” I couldn't be absolutely sure and what if it was? Gerry had been giving that stuff the onceover. It was his, he had that right. Maybe he'd sat up here in the evenings, mooning over the woman who had worn it.

  His clothes seemed more tidily arranged than they used to be. But that was nearly three years ago and he might have pulled himself together. My room was just as I had left it, neat and tidy, of course, though covered in dust. Well, I don't expect miracles and for Gerry to have dusted the place would have been a miracle. Justin's was the last room I went into. I was beginning to doubt that sensation I had had on coming into the house that someone else, and not one of the girls, had been in there in my absence. I had to rethink that once again. Justin's room was as neat as when I left it. I always made him tidy up everything before he went to bed, but he made a tremendous fuss about it and time after time Gerry countermanded my orders and told him he could leave it. Neither of them had done this, I was sure of it. And Justin had a new toy. It was a model of a farm with cow
s and sheep and pigs, a couple of carthorses, about a hundred chickens, a duck pond, and a haystack. A farm, I may add, the like of which no one had seen for half a century. The farmer with his pitchfork and his wife with her milking pail looked like an Amish couple. Still, I suppose he liked it. Someone, probably his grandmother or one of the girls, must have given it to him—no, someone who didn't know him very well if they thought they were consoling him for my absence.

  Though the relative positions of the silver box and the pearls box made me speculate a bit, I wasn't much troubled. I had wished for a minute or two that I had laid a hair on top of the pearls box as then I'd have been able to be sure it had been moved. But I hadn't and it hardly seemed to matter. I made pasta for our supper, with salad and some good whole-grain bread. Justin turned his nose up at this last, as he always does, and said he liked white sliced bread like they had had somewhere or other. I thought they must have been eating out quite a lot and that was all I did think then.

  Gerry was very nice to me, nicer than he'd been for months, years probably. He asked about Mummy and said I must take time off whenever I liked to go and see her. Stay over a couple of nights if necessary. I said it was only in Ongar, no more than twenty-five miles away. I can't say either of them seemed to have missed me. We settled down to our usual evening television viewing, though I insisted on Justin going to bed first as it was already nearly half past eight. Gerry's niceness went on and on. He actually asked me if I had a preference as to which program we watched.

  I dusted my room before going to bed and shook the duster out of the window like Mummy used to do when I was little.

  THIS NEXT BIT I am writing two days later. I am doing it because I don't know what else to do, because I am still in a state of shock. It's Saturday and Gerry took Justin out to buy him a pair of shoes. Their feet grow so fast at his age that they go through three pairs a year. They would have their tea out somewhere, he said, and wouldn't be back till late.

  “Not after seven, I hope,” I said. “He was late last night and he shouldn't get into bad habits.”

  It wasn't a nice day. Intermittent rain had been falling since midday. I decided not to go out, though really I should have gone to the library as I'd nothing to read. Instead I looked through Gerry's meager collection of books, two shelves of them, that's all. Hebe, of course, read at most a couple of trashy novels a year and Gerry devotes all his time to the television, an absurd amount of time for an educated man. However, I found Charlotte Brontë's Villette—an O-level set book for one of them, I imagine—which I soon discovered was a depressing book if ever there was one. I am under no illusions about my condition and position in this world and I couldn't help seeing the parallels in Villette and my own case. The heroine might have been modeled on me if I had been alive at the time. Lucy Snowe, c'est moi. But Brontë makes the woman's neglect and loneliness a bit strong even for me, so I gave up and tidied the kitchen cupboards instead.

  They came in at twenty to eight and they weren't alone. Pandora was with them and Justin was holding her hand. That was the first time I had seen her since she brought my TV set but I didn't guess, I suspected nothing, though there was no sign of the new shoes. She took off her jacket, looked in the mirror in the hallway, smiled radiantly at me. I thought they had met her by chance somewhere and she had come back with them to talk about the flat, about something being wrong with the flat. Better talk about it face-to-face than on the phone. I nearly asked her.

  “I'll have to get Justin straight to bed,” I said.

  “Not for a moment, Jane,” Gerry said. In an unexpected departure from the norm he had poured glasses of wine, which he was handing to us.

  I sat down. “Apart from our parents, Jane, we want you to be the first to congratulate us. Pandora and I are engaged. We're going to get married in November.”

  19

  After Gerry made that announcement I struck out with my right hand—I don't know why, perhaps to push him away—and I knocked over the glass of wine. The glass broke and the wine went everywhere. I shut my eyes, turned away, and ran to the stairs, ran up the stairs. In my room I threw myself down on the bed, hearing his words like a hammer beating against the inside of my head.

  “Pandora and I are engaged. We're getting married in November.”

  How long had it been going on? Since she brought my TV set here, it must have been, since she walked in here and insinuated herself by being nice to Justin. The way to a father's heart. And it was my own fault. I felt that from the start as I lay on my bed. It was my own fault and typical of my luck. In trying to be kind, to be thoughtful, I had offered Gerry Furnal my TV to replace his broken set. I might as well have told him I had found him a wife and I might as well have invited her to seduce him.

  She came upstairs after me. I had known she would—but no, I hadn't known it, I had still expected more consideration, more tact. We go on hoping to find the best in people, however jaundiced we are. She came up and knocked at the door. I said, “Go away,” but she didn't. She came in, her face all false concern and fake sympathy.

  “I'm sorry you're so upset, Jane,” she said. “There's no need. We want you to stay. We shall need you if I go on working, as I mean to.”

  I said to her to get out.

  “Gerry shouldn't have told you like that,” she said. “It must have been a shock. But you'll see how little difference it will make. I know there's not much room in this house but we shall buy a bigger house and we'll see if we can give you your own living room. Jane, we can be friends.”

  That was when I struck out at her. I jumped up and hit her with my fists. She tried to seize hold of my wrists but gave up with a cry when I clawed at her face with my nails. He came up then, because she was screaming, and he took hold of me and said he would get the police. Of course he didn't, he wouldn't want the neighbors seeing something like that. I struck him hard across the face and then I stopped. I don't know why but the fight went out of me and I lay on my bed, sobbing. Even then they didn't leave me. There was barely room for them in the room, but they stayed, she sitting on the end of my bed and he in the one chair, and they talked all forgivingly and sweetly about how they knew I hadn't meant to attack them. I was ill, they knew I was.

  “You need counseling, Jane,” she said, “and we're going to see you get it. We owe you that.” Isn't it amazing the way a man and woman only have to know each other for five minutes before they're talking about “we”?

  “There was never any intention on my part,” Gerry said in his pompous way, “of asking you to leave.” He put his hand up to his cheek, where I had hit him. It was bright red. “We'll forget all this,” he said. “It'll be as if it had never happened. Now do stop crying.”

  “I'll go down and make you a cup of tea,” she said.

  I said that if she did I would throw it at her. That sent them away, but the house was so small and the walls so thin I could hear them conferring in the room next door. I could hear him saying to leave me alone, I would be better in the morning, and her saying she would stay with him, she wouldn't leave him alone to “cope with it all.” I knew then that it was she who had been in the house in my absence in Ongar, she who had given Justin the farm and had moved the jewelry boxes. I shouted something but they didn't hear me or pretended they didn't. She must have looked at the pearls and planned on wearing them when she is installed here.

  The strange thing was that I slept after that. Those two had worn me out. I lay there, thinking I would have to get up and go to the bathroom, I would have to do it without them seeing me go across the landing, but the next thing I knew it was deep darkness, the street lamp that always lit this miserable cell of mine had gone out, and when I looked at my digital clock I saw it was four in the morning. Fully clothed still, I crept out to the bathroom. He had left his bedroom door open. My eyes getting used to the dark, I could see the two of them in his bed, Hebe's bed, his head on one of the pillows, hers on his shoulder. I didn't expect to sleep but I did and didn't wake a
gain until eight.

  • • •

  “I DON'T THINK you need counseling,” he said to me next day when I told him I'd rather die than stay there. “You need a psychiatrist.”

  I quote that to show the kind of insults they leveled at me. She told me in her patronizing way that she knew our agreement said she would have to carry on paying me rent for my flat. That was all right, she'd be happy to do that. I could see the scratches on her face I had made with my nails. I wonder how she explained them to other people. If you want to get another nanny's job, he said, I'll give you a good reference. After telling me I needed psychiatric help? I laughed at him. He went on as if I hadn't laughed and said they would forget all about last night. “Why not stay till our wedding?” he said.

  I didn't reply to any of this. The previous evening I had tried answering, I had seen where that got me, and now I could see the only thing was to be silent. Send the two of them to Coventry. I looked at them in what I hope was dignified silence and shook my head ever so slightly. I couldn't quite bring myself to treat Justin the same way. He was an innocent child—well, he was a child. But he needed some explanation of the noise and fuss those two had made the previous night.

  “I shan't be seeing you anymore, Justin,” I said. “Daddy and Pandora have been very unkind to me so I have to go. Do you understand?”

  He stared at me in that disconcerting way he has. “I don't know,” he said.

  That day she fetched all her stuff from my flat and I put mine into my car. We didn't speak. In silence she put the envelope with a check for my rent in it into my hand. He had gone to work without giving me the promised reference. There was no way I would dream of working as anyone else's nanny ever again but he wasn't to know that. He forgot; he didn't bother. She had unpacked her car and I had packed mine and I was putting the front door key he'd given me two and a half years before on the hall table, when she broke her silence.