The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  When we talk, which is too often to my mind, it's always about my situation and what's to be done. The best plan (her words) is for me to come to Ongar “on a permanent basis,” live with her until part of the house can be converted into a self-contained flat for me and get “a nice little job” locally.

  “I've always believed you have to cut your garment according to your cloth, Jane,” she says. “It's no good having all these high-flown ideas. It used to upset me thinking of you taking these menial jobs after your education, but I've come down to earth now. There's nothing wrong with working in a shop, it's honorable toil.”

  I don't want to scream at her so I say nothing.

  “Anything is better than living on the assistance.” She doesn't know it's years since that expression was in use. “When I was young people would rather starve than be supported by the government.” I wonder where she thinks the government gets the money. Doesn't she know what happens to taxes?

  She talks as if she's a hundred and workhouses still exist, instead of only a bit over sixty. But when she says that about the government I smile to myself, because that's just what I mean to do, be supported by at any rate one member of the government. While she drones on about working in a shop in Ongar High Street or being a mother's help (“Goodness knows, you've had the experience, Jane”) or a traffic warden, I think about the letter I'm going to write to Ivor Tesham, a very discreet and subtle letter, hinting at connections and links, just mentioning Lloyd Freeman and slipping in Hebe's name. I'll suggest we meet to talk about old times, but first I'll drop the name of a famous journalist who specializes in digging dirt about well-known people and say I know him. I don't, but I easily may do in the future. I have now forced myself to think only about the actions I shall take, not about my feelings and my fears.

  Mummy talks about the flat she's planning. I am to have a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The house has three floors, the top one being smaller than the lower two, and it's “absolutely perfect” for conversion. The short landing will become my hallway and all that has to be done is put the front door in at the top of the stairs.

  “Are you listening, Jane?”

  I tell her that of course I am, though more than half my mind has been on how I'm going to find which house Tesham lives at in Glanvill Street. Perhaps I can take Mummy to see the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben and after I've told her I'm not queuing up to go inside, we could take a little walk along the streets behind Millbank. Maybe go and look at that church they call Queen Anne's Footstool. There's bound to be something on the house or outside the house to show he lives there—but is there? I've seen his car, but that was four years ago and he may have a different one or it may be in a garage. Perhaps either he or Carmen will show themselves at a window. I hope it's not a very long street or we'll be all day about it. And when I say “we” I have to remember that Mummy knows nothing about this and mustn't know.

  “You haven't heard a word from this Stuart,” she says. “Hasn't he got a phone?”

  I HAVE SEEN Sean Lynch again.

  It doesn't really matter because I'm sure he didn't see me. It happened like this. Mummy and I went to Westminster and when we'd been in the Abbey I suggested having a look at St. John's Church, Smith Square. Then we went along Great Smith Street and turned down Glanvill Street. It's grand, like everywhere else around there, somber and ancient and somehow political. I wonder how Carmen likes it. Well, I expect I'd like it if living there cost me nothing and I had all found for me. She's not afraid of him. But then she's what men call beautiful and I suppose beautiful women aren't afraid of handsome men. They are theirs by right, only what they deserve. Stu is what I deserve, I suppose.

  But we couldn't find Tesham's house. I say “we,” though of course Mummy didn't know what I was looking for. No one looked out of any windows; no one came out of any of the houses. The place was still and quiet and empty but for a ginger cat sitting on top of a pillar and it was as still as everything else in the street, its eyes shut. We went home on a series of buses. Mummy enjoyed it, gazing out of the window at government buildings and shops and theaters and pubs and dirty back streets. Bored by the snail's-pace progress, I pondered ways of getting Tesham's address, ignoring Mummy's proddings and suggestions that I should look at some particular architectural monstrosity or exotic shop-window display. Of course I had already looked for Tesham in the phone book, while knowing he wouldn't yet be there. He wasn't. I'd even thought he might have his phone in Carmen's name, but Case wasn't there either. Wasn't there something called the electoral register? I wondered where such a thing was kept and if the public were allowed to look at it.

  The second bus we got on was a mistake. I soon realized it was taking us too far west. I tried to tell Mummy we'd have to get off in a minute and find one going in the Camden Town direction, but she was too absorbed in looking at the Lebanese restaurants in the Edgware Road to take any notice. It was then that, at last obeying her command to “just look at that one and that woman in a veil,” I leaned across her and brought my face to the window. Walking toward the Edgware Road from a side street was Sean Lynch.

  I shouldn't have been surprised. He lived just round the corner. Perhaps it was more shock than surprise, as I'd often in the past weeks congratulated myself on the likelihood that I'd never have to set eyes on him again. He was in his black leather gear, just as he'd been when he'd thrown me out of the flat in William Cross Court. Perhaps he always dressed like that, changing only the T-shirt and the jeans. I withdrew my head, sat back, feeling beads of sweat sting my upper lip.

  “What's the matter with you, Jane?” At last my mother had taken her eyes off the outside and was peering at me in a concerned and very intrusive way. “Your hands are shaking. I really wonder sometimes if you're quite well. When did you last see your GP?”

  I hadn't a GP. I hadn't registered with one since I left Irving Road. But there was no need to tell her. She'd have gone on about the wonderful medical practice she went to in Ongar and the breathtakingly clever woman doctor who would be “happy to look after you, Jane” when I came home with her “in a week or two's time.”

  We got off the bus and onto another one. Mummy lost interest in external panoramas and returned to her plans for my future. The wisest thing I could do, she said, was put my flat on the market immediately. If it didn't look like selling in the next fortnight, say, I could leave the keys with the estate agent and move out. She was sure I'd agree with her that I had very little furniture worth worrying about. Why not have one of those firms that clear flats come in and dispose of the lot? With an eye to my consenting to these arrangements, as she'd known I must, she'd set aside a sum of money for furnishing the new flat, just as she'd already spoken to her “tame builder” about the conversion.

  “Are you listening to me, Jane?”

  I said I was. It was as if a bit of my mind that dealt with dull and boring things that would never happen anyway had split off from the main part and was replying to her automatically. The rest was making decisions about Ivor Tesham and how I was going to find out about the electoral register— wasn't it also called the voters' list?—and how I could make phone calls without Mummy being there and listening. But that part was preoccupied too with a kind of irrational fear of Sean Lynch. It was some time since I'd been to his flat and been subjected to that horrible treatment but, I told myself, it was a one-off. I'd never go there again. I'd never go near the place. I'd never even use Warwick Avenue tube station. There was nothing to worry about. It was surely just that his manhandling me in that way was something that never happens to people in our society. No one did that sort of thing to a person who had just called at his home and been perfectly polite. That must be why I was so—well, frightened, when I saw him out of the window of that bus. So frightened that my hands had started shaking, the way they had when I went home after that awful encounter. They way they did regularly in my dreams.

  It's over, I kept saying to myself, it's over
and can never happen again. He doesn't know where you live, there's no way he can know. You never even told his mother your name. He has forgotten all about you. Even if he had looked up and seen you on that bus he wouldn't have recognized you. He doesn't have dreams. Thick, stupid people don't.

  MUMMY NEVER GOES out without me. She says she'd get lost. So I've bought her a small paperback copy of the London A—Z, street guide. I'm desperate to get her out of here so that I can make a couple of phone calls. Phoning Westminster Council will be a start, or more than a start, maybe the answer to my problem. But I can't make that call with Mummy there, curious to know why I do everything that I do. She spent last evening reading the A—Z, commenting every few seconds on London districts she'd never heard of or curious street names. Did I think all the Alexandra Roads were named for Princess Alexandra or the late Queen Alexandra? Did I know there was a Fifth Avenue in Kensal Rise, just as there was in New York?

  “You'd better get out there and explore,” I said. “You could go and have a look at this Fifth Avenue—see if it's grand or just ordinary.”

  “I'd be nervous, Jane. It's not like Ongar. There's so much crime on the streets.”

  Next day it was bright and sunny and I had to pull down the blinds at one of the windows, the light that came flooding in was so glaring. Mummy was up and in the bathroom. I put the coffee on and went downstairs to pick up the post and the paper. The Times was there, on the hall table with my name on it, and there was an envelope for me—fairly unusual this. It was from the people who supply me with gas and when I opened it I saw it was a red final notice. I hadn't paid my gas bill.

  This is something that never happens to me. However skint I am, I always pay my services bills, go without decent food and drink if I have to, and I couldn't imagine I'd failed to pay this one. Upstairs again, I went straight to the drawer under the kitchen counter where I put bills and receipts. (Incidentally, it's underneath the one where I keep instructions for using equipment and where I'd put Hebe's pearls—long gone now, of course.) The original gas bill wasn't there. Perhaps they'd never sent it to me. If they had I'd have put it in this drawer. Where else? The flat's so small it hasn't numerous drawers and cubbyholes to store stuff in. I took out the equipment instructions from the top drawer one by one in case I'd put the gas bill in there by mistake.

  Mummy came out of the bathroom in her dressing gown while I was hunting for it. Inquisitive as usual, she wanted to know at once what I was looking for. To keep her quiet, I showed her the final notice, but of course it didn't keep her quiet. The advice, the suggestions, the reproofs streamed out of her as she poured coffee and made toast. She always paid her bills on the nail, by return of post actually, but then it was most unwise to put bills away in a drawer. That way they were soon overlooked. It was unimportant now to find the mislaid gas bill. The “gas people” wouldn't have made a mistake, they didn't in her experience. All I must do was pay the bill now, this morning. Surely I wouldn't have any difficulty in doing so, seeing I had received my “welfare” the day before, not to mention the check she had given me.

  “Don't mention it then,” I said, goaded.

  “Thank you for that, Jane. I'm well aware gratitude is something you don't begin to understand.”

  I'd seriously offended her. It's a funny thing but you can snub people like her, you can ignore them or put them down, but fail to treat them reverently in money matters and they're really upset.

  “I think I will go out,” she said. “On my own, I mean. Please don't offer to come with me. I don't want your company just at present, thank you.”

  “What about all that crime on the streets?”

  “I shall just have to risk it, shan't I?”

  For some reason she tied a scarf round her head and, saying like the man who went with Scott of the Antarctic that she might be some time, borrowed one of my umbrellas. There wasn't a cloud in the sky but she took an umbrella. The A–Z was in her bag, as if it was a guide to some foreign city and she a tourist.

  Once she'd gone it came to me quite quickly what must have happened to my gas bill. Stu had taken it. He must have opened the drawer while I was on the phone with my back to him. There didn't seem any reason for him to take it except to cause trouble and maybe get my gas cut off. But when I thought about it, I remembered other things that had gone missing from that drawer, including money. Some time before Pandora came to live here, several notes I'd put in an envelope for paying a paper bill unaccountably disappeared. Only it wasn't unaccountable any longer, was it?

  I sat down and wrote a check for the gas people. Then I wrote to the estate management people, the ones I pay my ground rent to, telling them I wouldn't have their window cleaner in my flat again. But I didn't send it. I started thinking about Stu. I started thinking what would have happened if I'd said all right and gone out for that drink with him. Looking back, I ask myself if any man has actually said those words to me before: you want to come out for a drink? I don't think anyone ever has. But I think, from what I've read and other girls have told me, that this is what men do say. Those are the first words they use when they want to start a relationship with you. The two lovers—if you can call them that—that I've had didn't ask me out for a drink. The married one started snogging me—horrible word but expressive of what he did—walking me to the bus stop after I'd been at his house having tea with his wife. I was feeling low after being out somewhere with Hebe when I met the single one on the top of a bus, so low and hopeless that when he wanted to come home with me I said yes. He came “home with me” a couple more times, but I think that was just out of the kindness of his heart. He was ugly to look at but he had a nice nature.

  Stu looked really hard at me, he stared at me, when he asked me to go out for a drink. That makes me wonder if he's a bit obsessed with me and he took the gas bill just to find out my name. He wouldn't have known it before, only the number of this flat and that he's supposed to come here once a month. I tear up the letter I've written. Then I have an idea. I pick up the phone, ask the inquiries people for a phone number for Tesham, Glanvill Street, Westminster, and they give it to me. I wait ten minutes and call them again. It's a different voice and this time I give the phone number and ask for Tesham's number in Glanvill Street. They give me that too.

  Did I really see Sean Lynch in the street or was it my imagination? I've given him a German shepherd dog but I've never seen it. Perhaps it's not true and there's no dog. It's Callum who had the dog, the mastiff, but it's dead now and Callum is dead. I am looking out of the window but there is no one in the street, no men and no dogs.

  25

  Mummy has been mugged. She hasn't been hurt, though I expect she would have been if she hadn't given the man her handbag when he asked for it. I think immediately that the man must have been Sean Lynch.

  “Was he wearing black leather? Was he a big thick-set man with long yellow hair, dirty hair?”

  She clutches my arm. “You know someone like that? Do you, Jane? You must tell me.”

  I tell her his name and where he lives and I would have gone on to the rest of it, I think, but she cut me short. “It wasn't a man,” she says. “It was a boy. He was only about sixteen.”

  She is so stupid she makes me angry. I wanted to hit her, claw at her the way I did at Pandora. But I turn away while she tells me she actually walked into a police station and told them what had happened. They took details from her and said an officer would come round here later in the day. But they won't catch him, of course they won't. A hundred pounds was in that handbag. I can't help thinking how much better it would have been if she'd given that money to me before she went out. Her Visa card was in there too—I am surprised she had one—and she wants me to ring them and tell them to cancel it and give her a new one, because she doesn't know how to. Can the sixteen-year-old buy a lot of expensive things and empty her bank account? I say, not if we are quick, and I get on the phone straightaway.

  She will never go out alone in London again, she
says. How people can live here with that sort of threat around she doesn't know. I shall have to come with her to buy a new handbag, because the one that was stolen was the only bag she had with her. Then she remembers her keys. They have gone too and she has to phone her neighbor, the fat woman, who has a spare set. Is there any way the boy who took her bag can know the keys open the front and back doors of her house in Ongar?

  “Not unless there was something in your bag with your address on it.”

  “Let me think,” she says. She remembers the letter from her old schoolfriend in Scotland and not only the letter but also the envelope it came in.

  “You'll have to have new locks put on your doors,” I tell her, hoping this will send her home fast.

  But her mention of that envelope with her address on it reminds me of my gas bill, which Stu must have taken. He knows my address already, though, so he must have taken that bill to have something of mine. No one has ever been in love with me but he might be. There's always a first time. I'm half wishing I hadn't been so hasty in saying no thanks when he asked me to have a drink with him. He's not good-looking but then nor am I. I used to think I was a cut above people like him because of my education and the way I speak. Because I've been to a university and he left school at sixteen. But if I do what Mummy wants, there won't be so much difference, will there, between a shop assistant and a window cleaner?