The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  ENGAGEMENTS ARE NOT what they used to be, essential precursors to marriage. In some ways they have become like the civil partnerships for heterosexual couples we didn't have then and still don't have now but are talked about a lot. The girl wears a ring that might as well be a wedding ring except that it usually has a diamond in it; the couple refer to each other as “my fiancé(e)” instead of “my husband” and “my wife.” They have no tax concessions but otherwise they might as well be married. The chances are, of course, that they never will be.

  Ivor and Juliet got engaged at the end of May. The occasion was another excuse for a party in Glanvill Street but this time we didn't go, for the simple reason that we couldn't find a babysitter. It's harder when you've three children, especially when one of them is only months old. My mother was in Mallorca, Iris's mother herself at the party. We had to be content with the pictures a tabloid used, one of celebrity guests arriving and another of Juliet holding Ivor's arm and showing off her diamond and sapphire trophy. I wondered if all those photographs would spark off another visit from Beryl Palmer, but if it did Ivor said nothing about it.

  If he heard nothing from her, a disquieting piece of news came to him from Sean Lynch. Ivor had more or less discontinued his visits to the Lynches, but he apparently made up for this by inviting Sean to any functions he could attend and yet be lost in the crowd. When I pointed this out to him he denied it angrily. His attitude to Sean was no different, he insisted, from that he had for any of his friends, for Jack, for instance, or Erica Caxton or the Trenants. I could have commented that he met all these people in t^te-à-t^te situations with Juliet, but I didn't. He wanted to tell me what Sean had to say about a visitor to the Lynches' flat.

  Ivor's engagement party wasn't the ideal occasion for imparting unwelcome news but I suppose Sean had no choice. He took Ivor aside and told him he had come home and found a woman there questioning Dermot and his mother about the crash in which Dermot was injured. She said she was from Westminster Council but Sean didn't believe this. Ivor asked him her name and, when he said he didn't know, to describe her.

  “A dog,” Sean said in his brutal way. “Short, skinny, frizzy hair.”

  Ivor said he felt Sean was keeping something back. He was genuinely angry, Ivor could tell that, but disclosing only as much as he thought Ivor needed to know. He almost confirmed this by saying, “You don't want to worry, Ivor. You've got enough on your plate without that. I can handle her, the cow. I just reckoned it wouldn't be right to keep it from you.”

  Sean's description wasn't conclusive. Ivor had to ask. “You don't know who she was?”

  “Not a social worker from the council. Let's leave it there, shall we?”

  “It was Jane Atherton,” Ivor said to me. “Sean wouldn't say but I'm sure.”

  He was made nervous. Perhaps the good time, the quiet months, years really, were past. Things were starting to happen, small things, of little importance, but they added up. Maybe the next one wouldn't be so small. But time went by and he heard nothing more from Sean and nothing from Jane Atherton or Beryl Palmer. He began to think that freak storm was dying down. But something much bigger was looming.

  The function to which he and Juliet had been invited was in Carlton Gardens, a fund-raising reception for the Marfan Syndrome Society. Ivor knew very little about Marfan and wasn't particularly interested in it, but Juliet was. Her father, now dead, had suffered from it and so did her brother. Once she was in her teens and it was clear that she didn't have it, she had learned it was genetic and could be inherited. Marfan, apparently, is one of those hereditary conditions which, if you have it, you have a fifty-fifty chance of passing it on to your children, hence the brother showing its symptoms. Juliet knew by then that, since she didn't have it, it had so to speak died with her and she could never pass it on. As Iris and I had noticed, she wanted children and was anxious too, of course, that when they came (if they ever came, if Ivor would permit it) they should be healthy. She retained her interest and with it a hope of helping sufferers, so she accepted the invitation and they both went to the reception.

  Through the years that had passed since Hebe's death, Ivor told me he had carefully avoided being present at anything connected with the Heart and Lung Trust, of which Gerry Furnal had been chief fund-raiser. He avoided all charity functions unless going to them was politically expedient except for those taking place in his constituency and these he attended for that reason. How much of this came from a fear of encountering Gerry Furnal I don't know but certainly Furnal was unlikely to be promoting the interests of HALT in Morningford. It's possible that Ivor would have put aside caution and gone to a HALT reception if it had taken place there, but it's more probable he would have pleaded government business kept him away.

  It seems that he'd assumed Hebe's husband was still in the job he had at the time of her death, though he could easily have found out whether he was or not. Perhaps he thought that the process of finding out, even if done in privacy, would make him look cowardly to himself. And how he looked to himself was very important to him. He and Juliet arrived about half an hour after the Marfan party started, Ivor hoping not to have to stay long as they had a dinner engagement. There were rather too many people for the size of the room and moving about was difficult. Someone he didn't know mounted the podium, introduced himself as the chairman of the association, and announced their principal speaker. It was Gerry Furnal.

  Ivor had noticed Furnal bustling around, fiddling with the micro phone and shifting it about on the podium, but hadn't recognized him. Of course he had seen him before. He must have seen him at that HALT gathering in the Jubilee Room when he first met Hebe, but he had hardly noticed him. In Carlton Gardens, if he hadn't been introduced by what he called “some other do-gooding luminary,” Ivor wouldn't have known him. When the man's name was announced, he whispered to Juliet, “You know who that is?”

  She didn't. I think she'd forgotten Hebe's surname. She shook her head.

  “Hebe's husband,” he said.

  “Oh dear, does it embarrass you?”

  Ivor doesn't care for it to be thought by anyone that he could be embarrassed. English gentlemen aren't. It implies a weakness, I suppose, just as being asked if you're shy does or if you dislike speaking in public. He wanted people to believe him far too sophisticated to be embarrassed, while at the same time disapproving of the word “sophisticated” as applied to himself or to anyone else, approving of it only as a qualifier of concepts. So, “Not at all,” he told Juliet, “but I shall avoid him as I dare say he'll avoid me.”

  Gerry Furnal spoke quite eloquently (Ivor said) on the subjects of research into the treatment of Marfan and of possible future gene therapy. He named sums in millions that were needed to further these advances and spoke of an appeal that the society was shortly to launch. There was applause, amid which he stepped down and was immediately surrounded. As Ivor had told Juliet he would, he set about avoiding him. This wasn't a difficult task as for the first ten minutes after making his speech, large numbers of people wanted to speak to Furnal and hemmed him in. Ivor and Juliet circulated, losing sight of each other after a while, taking glasses of wine from proffered trays. Juliet stopped in her progress to talk to the society's president, whom she knew.

  Ivor was temporarily alone, making his way toward a Tory peer he had spotted on the far side of the room, the only person he felt like talking to, when Gerry Furnal came up to him. Ivor said he wasn't fazed. He was probably the most important guest there and it was only to be expected that MSS's chief fund-raising officer would wish to speak to him. Smiling, he held out his hand.

  Furnal didn't take it. Ivor said he was absolutely cool and quiet, for which (being the sort of man he was) he rather admired him.

  “There was no exchange of pleasantries,” Ivor told us, “none of that how-are-you-good-of-you-to-come stuff. Well, there wouldn't be in the circumstances. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a pearl necklace. It wasn't in a case or anything,
it wasn't even in a bag. I didn't recognize it. The fact is I'd forgotten all about the bloody thing. He said, ‘I believe you gave this to my late wife. Perhaps you'll take it back, as I have no use for it.'

  “My God, Ivor,” Iris said. “It must have been a hell of a shock. Did you blush?”

  “Don't be silly. I don't blush. I said I didn't want it, he'd much better keep it, and he said very pompously something about its being dirty and he no longer wished to be soiled by it. A lot of people had gone by then, so there was a bit more space, and a couple of women were staring. I didn't have a choice really. I put the pearls in my pocket and walked off, found Juliet and we went.”

  I asked him if that was all Furnal had said.

  “That was all.”

  “How did he know?” Iris asked. “How did he know it was you who gave her the pearls?”

  “I couldn't exactly ask, could I? I'm sure Hebe never told him. It's possible he remembered seeing me speak to Hebe when I first met her in the Jubilee Room. I wouldn't think that was enough. I mean, that's putting two and two together and making about fifty-seven, isn't it?”

  I asked him when this MSS reception was and he said two days before. “Has anything happened since?”

  “If you mean have I heard from him, no, there's been nothing. I doubt if anything will happen. He's had his moment of triumph and he'll probably dine out on it for the rest of his life. If he dines out, that is.”

  “I don't think he'll dine out on it,” Iris said quietly.

  “Yes, well, please don't tell me I've ruined his life or anything like that. Men get cuckolded, end of story.”

  He had brought the pearls with him in a Boots plastic bag. “God knows what he's done with the case,” he said, and he tipped them out onto the table. Nadine and Adam had joined us by this time and my little girl was, of course, entranced by what she called “the big beads.” To Ivor's amusement, she picked them up and ran them through her fingers. “I offered them to Juliet, but she said, ‘I don't do pearls.' I said she was wearing pearls in her ears when I first met her but to no avail. She was a bit cross.” He put his head on one side and a hand on Nadine's shoulder. “You can have them, sweetheart—would you like to?”

  Iris was furious. She snatched the pearls out of Nadine's hand, stuffed them back into the bag and shouted at Ivor, “No, she can't. Never dare say that again! She doesn't want your ladyfriend's leftovers and nor do I.”

  Nadine began to cry. More than cry, she screamed and shouted, frightened by an anger she had never heard from her mother before, and Adam gave fraternal support by joining in. It took a long time for all of them to calm down, Iris taking Nadine on her knee and promising her “a lovely pearl necklace” of her own. We all had drinks after that, gin for the grown-ups and orange juice for the children, while Ivor told us in a much more sensible and rational way that he thought the worst was over, the worst had been at the MSS reception, and there would be no more. Gerry Furnal wasn't going to talk to the newspapers.

  WHEN A COUPLE more days had gone by and nothing else had happened, things began to look hopeful. With luck, I was thinking, we should hear no more of Gerry Furnal, when Iris read an entry in the Births column of the newspaper which had carried the birth announcements of our daughter and our two sons. Since Nadine was born, she had regularly read them and, of course, often come upon babies born to friends of ours, as happens when you're the sort of age we were then.

  ‘Furnal,' “ she read aloud to me, “ ‘On September first, in the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, to Pandora and Gerald, Ruby Anne, a half-sister for Justin.' It must be him, mustn't it?”

  “I'm glad he's married again,” I said. “I hope he's happy. I always felt he'd had a raw deal.”

  “So did I,” she said.

  Judging by my own experiences at a time like this, Gerry Furnal would have his hands too full and his emotions too much engaged to take any more vengeful steps against Ivor. Once again he had got away with it. Knowing Ivor had given Hebe an expensive present virtually proved she had been his mistress but not that he had arranged the abduction. It was likely, anyway, that, as most people, Furnal still believed Hebe had been abducted by mistake for Kelly Mason. He would need more information than he apparently had to link it with Ivor. He wasn't a threat. But thinking like this troubled me, as I know it troubled Iris. I didn't like the situation we seemed to be living in, where we had to tick off the names of people who no longer threatened her brother and grade those remaining in order of danger quotient: Jane Atherton, the second Mrs. Furnal (?), the Lynches, Beryl Palmer, and even Juliet herself.

  24

  Stu the window cleaner was here when Pandora phoned and told me about the baby. I don't know why she phoned. It's not as if I was dying to know. I wonder if they've realized they've given it a name rather like Hebe. Hebe, Ruby, both just four letters long, both two syllables and both ending in a “be” sound. Must be a sort of unconscious way of commemorating her on his part. I wouldn't like it if I were Pandora.

  Ostensibly polishing the windows, Stu hung about listening to our conversation. When I'd put the receiver down he asked if that was a pal of mine who'd had a baby. I said that was right and it was the woman who'd lived here.

  “Time you had one yourself,” he said with a sort of leer.

  I didn't answer that. I said that, on the contrary, it was time he got on with his work.

  “I've finished.” He put the polishing cloth in his pocket. “You want to come out for a drink?”

  I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I stared at him, then shook my head. “No, thanks,” I managed to say.

  “Suit yourself.” He slammed the door behind him.

  What a nerve! How dared he? I looked in the mirror and saw I'd blushed quite deeply and the remains of the blush were still there. The funny thing was that I wasn't all that angry and when Mummy arrived here I told her about it, altering things round a bit, of course.

  “His name's Stuart,” I said. “I hardly know him but he asked me out. Of course I'm not going.”

  “I should think not,” she said, “with Callum not long dead.” She didn't want me going out with him but—typical of her—she wanted to know what Stuart did for a living.

  “Something to do with glass,” I said. “His father's got a company that manufactures windows.”

  “You young ones,” she said. “Have you forgotten people have surnames? You never told me Callum's surname.”

  “He didn't have one,” I said. “He had a dog.” She gave me a strange look, the kind you give to people who talk to themselves or laugh without a reason for laughing. Before she could ask me what I meant, I invented, “Stuart's called Chumley-Burns.”

  But I've other things to think about now, the principal one being how to get access to Ivor Tesham. Calling him and inviting him here worked last time but that was four years ago. Nothing has happened to damage him in those years and he has gone on climbing up the ladder or, as Mummy would say, gone from strength to strength. Her presence here is another reason for not inviting him. With her in the flat I can't have him here—he wouldn't come, anyway—and I don't stand a chance of getting into his place. So I have a choice, I can phone him or write to him, and to be perfectly honest (again as Mummy would say) I'm afraid to phone him. I'm afraid of that voice, that accent, on the phone, even supposing he ever answers a phone himself. Even supposing I could get hold of his home number. I have to find out his address somehow and write to him.

  But I am altogether afraid of him. Handsome, sophisticated men frighten me. I realize now that they always have and Tesham is the handsomest, most sophisticated man I've ever met. It's humiliating to remember how I had a shower and washed my hair and got dressed up when he came here, though I was determined not to. I started to enjoy it when I could see he was expecting to get the pearls, but that enjoyment was short-lived. Hebe would have said the feelings I have about him are sexual and perhaps they are, but does that mean I'd like to go to bed with him? Suppose I'd had my
hair done and I was beautifully made-up as well as witty and sophisticated myself? Suppose I were sitting in a restaurant with him, his fingertips just touching mine across the table? I won't write any more about this in case I start imagining what I'd feel if I was with him in a bedroom wearing Hebe's dog collar and black leather boots and a black leather corset.

  MUMMY CAME HERE two days ago. She was desperately worried about me, she said. I wasn't answering her letters and I left my phone on message. The only way she knew I was alive was that I was cashing the checks she sent me. All this I got from a message she left, of course. And when I tried to phone her and tell her not to come, please not to come, she left her phone on message—thus, as she said, hoisting me with my own petard.

  On her previous visits, not long after my dad died, she'd wanted to “see the sights.” London is where she has always lived, yet she's never lived there. You can't call Ongar and Theydon Bois and Havering London, but what else are they? No man's land, outer suburbs, sticks. She's always lived in one or other of them and her London has been “coming up to town” and shopping in Oxford Street. Until I took her, she hadn't been to the Tower or the National Gallery or Hyde Park. Visiting places by car was all right six or seven years ago—well, it was never really all right for me—but now the traffic is making it impossible. She still wants to, though. Or she says she does. I think trailing about by bus and tube is intended as therapy for me, to bring me “out of myself,” to do what people mean you should when they say you need to get out more.

  She's come up here to take me in hand. I'm living like an old retired person, she says, an older and more retired person than even she is. Not that she ever did anything to retire from. She means to stay at least a week, she says. Every evening she takes me out for a meal to some local Italian or Chinese restaurant. This is to save me money and “give us a chance to talk over a glass of wine.” We have to share a bed, there's no choice about it. Fortunately, it's a wide bed and she sleeps deeply while I lie awake or dream of Sean Lynch coming into the bedroom in his black leather with his German shepherd dog. Mummy doesn't snore or fidget, but she always has to get up at least once in the night to go to the bathroom—normal, I suppose, in a woman her age. The annoying thing is that she thinks I'm not aware of her creeping about on tiptoe and when I say I am she tells me that I was “dead to the world.”