The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  “Jane,” she said, “you need help, you really do.”

  Could anything be more insulting? I didn't answer her. I got into my car and drove away, back to Kilburn. As soon as I was inside I went all round the place, looking for damage she might have done to it. And sure enough (as Mummy says) there was a burn mark from a hot dish on the draining board, a chip out of one of the bathroom tiles, and one of the window blinds was badly torn. I didn't hesitate. I took my writing materials out of the drawer below the one where I had kept the pearls and wrote Pandora a formal letter, citing the damage and telling her that, in view of it, I wouldn't be returning the deposit she had paid me.

  I was in the middle of doing this when Stu, the window cleaner, let himself in. No warning, of course. He didn't even ring the bell. He told me I had turned up like a bad penny and that the woman who had just left was a “smashing-looking bird.” The first thing I had meant to do when I had finished the letter was check that Hebe's things in the case at the bottom of the cupboard were all right, but I had to postpone that for an hour until Stu had gone. I unlocked the case, lifted out the blue woolly dressing gown and found everything underneath just as I had packed it. I will say for Pandora that the flat was quite clean and tidy too. Apparently, if she is nothing else, she is quite houseproud.

  HELP I DON'T need but I do sometimes wonder what I have done to deserve all this. Things were really going quite well for me (as well as they ever get, that is). I was getting on all right with Gerry and Justin, I was saving money, I was planning on replacing my car. Then came this bombshell to shatter everything. I just wish I knew why. I had some money in the bank, more than two thousand pounds, plus I had got her check and no deposit to return, but no more than that. Three-quarters of the rent she had paid me had gone on my mortgage. When I'd used up what money I'd got, how was I going to pay the building society?

  I would have to get a job, of course I would, and soon. Not a nanny's job—I meant what I had said, never never again. That meant another library, didn't it? The one I'd worked in, the Library of British History, had closed, had disappeared altogether. You can look down lists of appointments every day for weeks before you will see one for a librarian. I had to tell Mummy and she was full of helpful suggestions. Shops and cafés in Ongar High Street were always advertising for staff, she said, having forgotten the comments she'd made on the kind of job someone with a degree merited. When I told her I hadn't yet descended to working in a shop, she suggested doing a teacher training course. If I couldn't get a grant she would pay.

  “I hate children,” I said, and that was the end of that.

  I went to the Job Centre. It was the most humiliating thing I had ever done but I went there. They weren't very interested when I told them I had left my last job of my own accord. But they put me on their list, telling me I was overqualified for most of the work I was likely to get. I went home and got down to answering advertisements for PAs and secretaries. Twenty letters I wrote that first week and thirty the next. Out of all that lot I got an interview for one job. It was receptionist/secretary to three solicitors working in partnership. I didn't like the look of the place, a converted shop next door to one selling old clothes. The interview was for twelve noon. They kept me waiting ten minutes and when I said I hadn't any computer skills the woman who was interviewing me looked down her nose. There was nothing about computing skills in your ad, I said, and she said it was taken for granted, it shouldn't need to be stated.

  I had been back in my flat for six weeks and I'd applied for getting on for a hundred jobs when, looking through what the classifieds in the Standard had to offer, I came upon, under Marriages, the announcement of Gerry Furnal's to Pandora Anne Flint. I'd heard the phrase “reopening old wounds” but I had never really felt it applied to myself till then. I felt those wounds opening on my arms and legs and Gerry Furnal rubbing salt into them. Had he ever thought for one moment what he was doing to me, forcing me to leave, driving me to give up my job? I had sacrificed everything for him, abandoned an intellectual post in a distinguished library, looked after his child, cooked his meals and done his housework, not to mention removing the disgusting perverted clothes his precious wife had worn to titillate her lover. And had I breathed a word to him about the stuff I had found? Had I told him what she was really like? No, I had not. Had I mentioned her lover or even hinted she had one? Again, no, no, I had not. Rather, I had listened to him going on and on about how wonderful she was, how good, what a marvelous mother, and handed out so much sympathy that it made me sick to think of it.

  What a hypocrite he is. The moaning about Hebe I had to listen to went on evening after evening for months, how he could never think of another woman, but three years later—a mere three years later—he had taken up with my tenant. How shallow must he be to have fallen for a woman who looks superficially, for that's all it is, like his late wife? I wondered what Hebe would think of him if she knew. Maybe she does know. There may be an afterlife—who am I to say? Gerry used to tell Justin she was in heaven, watching over him from up in the sky. Perhaps she is watching us all—Gerry Furnal, poor little Justin, me, and even her lover, Ivor Tesham—and drawing her own conclusions.

  Life is unfair. That's the first thing I ever remember Mummy saying to me. I must have been about four. “Life is unfair, Jane,” she said. “You have to get used to that.” I think of it now when I contrast the lives of Ivor Tesham and me. I don't suppose for a moment he knows what it is to apply for job after job and get either one of two possible results: no reply at all or a reply saying the position has been filled. Of course he hasn't. Rich, powerful relatives got him jobs. Influential people gave him a helping hand into Parliament. Private incomes came along so that when bribery and corruption were the only possible ways for him to get advancement, he had the means to bribe and to corrupt. I always read the Births, Marriages, and Deaths in the paper. That's how I knew about Gerry Furnal's marriage. That's how I knew Ivor Tesham's father had died: John Hamilton Tesham, suddenly at home, beloved husband of Louisa and dear father of Ivor and Iris … I suppose he left his son a fortune. No one has ever left me anything. My mother's house in Ongar must be worth half a million. What's the betting, when she dies, someone will get planning permission to build an estate on her doorstep and halve the selling price?

  I am sitting down now in my bedsitter—for Stu was right, what else is it?—looking through the scrapbook. I've gone right back to the beginning and the newspaper cuttings of the accident in which Hebe died. There are four of them, the same scene of carnage and destruction shot from different angles. I can see torn and twisted metal, ripped tires, shattered glass and glass splinters and great shards of glass, but no bodies or body parts, no spatterings or splashes or lakes of blood. The only thing to give any sign that human beings were in that car, that human beings died in that car, is part of a coat or jacket draped over the back of a ruined seat. Had they taken the bodies away by the time those pictures were taken? Had they cut the driver out of the wreckage and removed him, broken and bleeding, to some emergency room? I don't know and I don't suppose anyone can tell me.

  I've written my own captions to these photographs. One of them says: The remains of the black Mercedes driven by Dermot Lynch, of Paddington, west London. I had forgotten his name. No wonder, really, after all I have been through. I have had other things to think about, to say the least. Now, though, I have nothing to think about except getting a job, getting money, to stay alive. No, that's an exaggeration. I shan't die. All that will happen to me is that I shall give up this place, the building society will foreclose, and I'll go and live with my mother. It's not an exaggeration to say that would be a fate worse than death.

  If I dwell too much on that I won't have the strength and the energy to write any more job applications. I won't make it to the interview I've got tomorrow, receptionist in the front office of a firm making breeze blocks in Craven Park, wherever that is. So I turn the pages of the scrapbook, past the photograph the Daily Expres
s used of the gun they found in the car, until I come to the first photo of Ivor Tesham. Of course there is nothing, there never was anything, to connect him with the crash.

  I wonder what has happened to Dermot Lynch of Paddington, west London. He was very seriously injured. Perhaps he died. I find the west London phone book, the residential section. Paddington is W2. There are a great many Lynches, a lot of them with the initial D., but none in W2. In fact, among all the Lynches, only one is in W2 and that is a P. H. Lynch at 23 William Cross Court, Rowley Place. P. H. could be his wife or his father or brother.

  I would like to know if Dermot Lynch is still alive.

  20

  I didn't get the job with the breeze-block manufacturers. On my way back from Craven Park the car broke down. I was stuck in the Harrow Road, unable to get the car to start and very much aware, once again, that this was only going to be a problem because it was going to cost me. For one thing, I had let my membership of the RAC lapse and for another I had given up using my mobile phone. I'd only had it to use in the car and practically the only time I needed it … Well, I had to leave the car where it was and walk to a garage half a mile away that a local shopkeeper said might help me. They did. They agreed to tow the car, look it over and assess what needed doing, but when I got back to it in their truck, I had got a parking ticket.

  Getting home by public transport would have taken hours. The only bus available was a number 18, which went nowhere near where I wanted to be. I got a taxi, though I couldn't afford it. The driver took me along the Harrow Road into Warwick Avenue and, because the road ahead was up, turned into Rowley Place. And there, on the right-hand side, a little way along, was William Cross Court. Was this a piece of luck? If it was, it was the first I'd had for years. Luck doesn't come my way, so I suspect it when it does. I can't help wondering if maybe it isn't luck at all or if it has a sting in the tail.

  What was the use of it, after all? I already knew a Lynch lived in William Cross Court if he lived anywhere. I could have found the place for myself without the intervention of an expensive taxi and a taxi driver. He turned into a road called Park Place Villas and up Maida Avenue to the Edgware Road. Of course he was going the longest and therefore most expensive way possible.

  MY CAR IS going to cost eight hundred pounds to put right, new crankshaft, new fan, four new tires, a lot of new parts for the engine and, of course, a new battery. And even then, the man says, it won't be as good as new. Frankly, he says, it should go to the scrap heap. I've started asking myself if I need a car, if it wouldn't be better to leave it where it is and ask Mr. Know-all to dispose of it.

  By bus and on foot I have called at six employment agencies and while I wait for something to come from them— from one of them—I scan the Situations Vacant in the newspapers. I stare at most of them in bewilderment. I don't know what they are. What is a people coordinator? What's a regeneration officer, an economic policy manager, a democratic services team leader? It's no good applying for them if I don't even know what the job description means.

  I have to be more positive. I have to think of my advantages, such as they are: my good English degree, my library experience, my two and a half years as a child's nanny. Surely that ought to help me get something in the health sector or, preferably, something in the health books sector, if there is such a thing. I start writing an application to a London authority—I can't go to Lancashire or Glasgow—for a job as a child care and family support officer, when the typewriter ribbon comes unraveled. It's worn out anyway. When Hebe saw it she said I must be the last person in London still using a typewriter and didn't believe me when I said I couldn't afford a computer. I suppose I can get a new ribbon tomorrow—if you can still buy them.

  I wouldn't have got the job anyway, I expect they want a social worker. The other letters I write by hand, one for a reviewing officer to a campaign called Child Alert and the other for a junior health economist, a post that trains you “to allow career progression toward a health economist position.” I won't get it. I know that. I won't be junior enough.

  Mummy phones. She hasn't heard from me for two weeks, she says. Is something wrong?

  “I don't know what put it into my head, Jane, but I got the idea you and Callum had parted. He hasn't left you, has he?”

  Not “you haven't left him,” I noted. I tell her Callum is dead. He died in a car crash when his car collided with a forty-ton lorry on the M1. I don't know why I do that, unless I was thinking of the crash in which Hebe died. It just comes into my head to put an end to him. Kill him, the way writers kill off characters they have invented.

  She gives a gasp and a little scream. There is no doubt she believes me. “You poor darling,” she says. “I'm so terribly sorry. Tell me what happened.”

  I say I would rather not talk about it. I tell her about the car and the typewriter. You have to have a car, she says. How are you going to get here without a car? That kind of selfishness almost makes me smile, it's so transparent. Never mind my needs, my feelings. All that matters is that I should be able to come to her. Sometimes she reminds me of Hebe and Justin, just as they reminded me of her.

  “Oh, I can walk half a mile to Kilburn Park station,” I say, “take the Bakerloo Line to Oxford Circus, half an hour at least for a Central Line train going to Epping, and then spend a fortune on a taxi to Ongar. Easy, no problem.”

  “There's no need to be sarcastic,” she says.

  I say that there is, there is need, sarcasm is my last resort, and she says she will pay for the repairs to the car. Meanwhile she will pay for me to rent a car. I ask her why she's doing all this. Has she turned over a new leaf? That makes her start crying. She has done her best for me always, she says between sobs, and now all she is asking is that I should let her pay for a rented car that will bring me to her. I'm tempted to put the receiver down but I don't. I realize something. I realize that she is all I've got, she is all I have got left. She's my only friend. I've no job, no money, no prospects. I soon won't have a home. Callum doesn't exist and never did, and my only friend is my mother. Of course I will let her pay for the repairs and the rental of a car. I've no choice.

  “I'm sorry, Mummy,” I say, my teeth gritted, and then I spin a long story about my last meeting with Callum, how dreadful it was getting the news of his death and how I feel I shall never recover from it. This was quite enjoyable and made me think I must do something like it more often. I could live in that fantasy world and invent a whole new personality and lifestyle and experience for myself, escape from the real dreary me. I could become a different person. I agree to go down and see Mummy at the weekend—not that weekends have any significance for me—and I shall stay a few days. Her voice sounds full of tears. Well, too bad.

  I WENT TO Ongar and stayed longer than I meant to, but it was quite pleasant to have someone to look after me for a change, instead of me looking after them, and while I was there I did my best to put my worries out of my mind. Mummy said she'd pay my mortgage for me until I got a job, that is she'd pay it for six months. I'd surely find something in that time. It all goes to show she must have far more money than she lets on.

  She kept talking about Callum, saying I must be in mourning for him. We had been together so long he was practically my husband. She likes going on in this way and I am sure she tells her friends about it. They are mostly widows, and now as a sort of semi-widow I am of their company. When I start thinking Callum really existed, I shall know I am going mad. Mummy used to say, and probably still does say, that one of the things that distinguishes the mad from the sane is that mad people don't know they are insane. But I read somewhere lately that schizophrenics have flashes of insight into their condition as it is taking a hold on them. I wonder if that is what is happening to me. I wonder why seeing the madness of inventing Callum and then killing him didn't stop me doing it, why I didn't say to Mummy that it was all nonsense. The answer must be because I am no longer quite sane and if things go on being bad for me I shall sink further i
nto madness.

  • • •

  THAT WAS GLOOMY enough, even by my standards. Back here, three letters were waiting for me, two turning me down for the people coordinator and team leader jobs, no surprise there, and one from, of all people, Pandora Furnal, as I suppose I must now call her. As she calls herself. It was only two days old.

  I expected more abuse but there wasn't any and nothing about wanting her deposit back. But that, I was sure, was because she was holding her fire. She wanted something, but she took the whole side of the page and half the other side before she got there. I may as well set down her letter in full.

  35 Fortune Vale

  London NW 11

  Dear Jane

  It is a long time since I have been in touch. As you can see from the address on this letter, we have moved. We are now living in Golders Green, an area I like because it is quite near to Hampstead Heath. I much prefer the school Justin goes to over the one in Hendon. Our house has four bedrooms, which is essential as, guess what, I am expecting a baby. It is due in August and, as you can imagine, we are both very excited about it. Gerry is over the moon. He is such a marvelous father.

  I enclose a cutting from a newspaper I found in your room when we moved. I know it must be yours as your writing is on the back. It had fallen down the side of the bed. I don't know if it is important but I thought it best to send it to you. I am sorry it has taken so long but we have been up to our eyes in it with the move.

  There is something else I want to run past you. Nothing personal or relating to what happened before you left. This simply concerns Gerry and me. Could we meet up some time? I could come to your place or we could liaise somewhere. I would really appreciate it.