The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  He lashed out at sleaze, having, I suppose, its latest perpetrator or victim, an air marshal with an unsuitable girlfriend, in mind, but referring to people in public office generally and to Tory MPs in particular. There was the one who had committed perjury and the one who had committed adultery and perjury and another who had accidentally hanged himself during some masturbatory activity. He harked back to orgiastic house parties of thirty years before and pinpointed a three-in-a-bed drama of recent months. His tone throughout was sanctimonious. It's my contention that all political parties have their sleaziness. With the left-wing, Labour or Liberal, it's mostly versions of fraud, while with the Conservatives it's sex. Once, when I put this theory to Ivor, he laughed and said he knew which kind he'd prefer, and most sensible people would agree with him.

  What view he took of Hunter's speech I don't know. We never discussed it. His view of the man was basically that politics was for professionals and those who had been trained in other disciplines shouldn't dabble in it, though where the dividing line between the amateur and people like himself came, he didn't say. One thing I was pleased to hear from him was that he and Juliet had “phased out” (his phrase) their visits to the Lynches.

  “The difficulty,” he said to me, “is the class difference. Always was, I suppose. I've pretended to myself that I can transcend all that, even that they enjoy my company and, God help us, I enjoy theirs. But it isn't so. They're not comfortable with me. I'm not comfortable with them. I can't take Sean's girlfriend calling me ‘Ive.' It's a bit easier for Juliet, they get on better there.”

  He paused. I thought for one uneasy moment that he was going to hint that Juliet was several rungs lower down the class ladder than he was, but he didn't. Maybe he recognized the danger in time and restrained himself.

  “But the upshot of it is that we've had to put the brakes on.” Along with his increased pomposity, my brother-in-law had taken on a good many politician's clichés since he became a minister. “I've had to face the fact that the important factor for them in our relationship, such as it was, is that I'm the source of a considerable chunk of their income. And why not? This way it's a good deal easier all round. It's no use thinking we can have a level playing field because we can't.”

  I've no idea if Ivor was the first to use that particular metaphor but he was certainly one of the first. He may have invented it. I'm sure that was the first time I'd heard anyone say it, though now of course it seems to have become accepted politics-speak. No major speech can afford to be without it. But Iris and I were glad of the break with the Lynches and told each other so, Iris adding that her brother seemed to be showing some sense at last. We were speaking too soon. Ivor's mistake was not so much that he had made contact with the whole Lynch family or that he had given them money, but rather that he had ever known them in the first place—that he had ever asked the man who serviced his car to drive the Mercedes that picked up Hebe.

  It was a while before we experienced a déjà vu feeling. News papers almost weekly carry a paragraph saying that a man (a nameless man at that stage) is helping the police with their inquiries. We noted what the rest of the country did, that someone had been found for the murder of Jane Atherton. The poor girl with the frizzy hair, the girl lying on her own bed in her own blood. What the newspapers seldom tell you is that the police have let this particular nameless man go home because he is the wrong man.

  This one, however, looked like the right man and he hadn't gone home. Not like he had once before, when suspected of IRA afiliations, which was where our we-have-been-here-before came in. His name was Sean Lynch and he'd been charged with Jane Atherton's murder.

  27

  We never knew how the connection was made, only possible ways in which it might have come about. But next day one single newspaper carried a short and apparently innocuous note: the arrested man was the elder brother of Dermot Lynch, driver of a kidnap car involved in a crash four years ago, in which two people had died. Now, once a man has appeared in court and been charged with an offense, the media are supposed to keep silent about him. His past, his antecedents, his family history, all this must not be touched upon in case public prejudice is created; it is from this public that a jury will later be drawn.

  Mostly they don't touch upon it, but there are exceptions, which usually give rise to rebuke or even threats from the judiciary. Revealing these facts about Dermot Lynch (who had never been tried for anything, let alone kidnapping) was a breach of this rule but nothing was ever done about it. In the normal course of things, Ivor would see several daily newspapers every morning but not, I thought, that day. He had told me on the phone the evening before that he would be flying to Culdrose in Cornwall “at the crack of dawn.” There's an RAF helicopter base at Culdrose and he was going there to view something or inspect something.

  At the present day you can get hold of anyone anywhere and at any time. Everyone carries a mobile phone. Apparently, there are more mobiles in this country than people. There weren't thirteen years ago. I hadn't got one and Iris hadn't. Poor Jane Atherton had one but only for use in her car. Ivor had shown me his but I didn't know the number and doubted if anyone at the department would give it to me. Also, phoning him while at an important visit that was part of his job wasn't the way I'd choose to break this news to him.

  Instead, I phoned Juliet.

  BEFORE I DID so I realized something which was always slipping my mind, that Ivor's fianceé knew as much about events of May 1990 as we did, probably as much as Ivor himself did. Nothing need be kept dark from her. There was no need for even ordinary discretion.

  She hadn't seen the paper but as soon as I read it out to her she said she'd come. No, we needn't arrange to meet somewhere, she'd come. She'd like an excuse to see the children. She arrived in Ivor's car, the big BMW. I don't know why, but if anyone had asked me or I'd asked myself I'd have said she was that rare creature, the person who can't drive. It's an absurd thing to say, and probably sexist too, but I'd seen her as ultra-feminine, too feminine to be a driver. Of course I was wrong. She steered the rather macho, cumbersome car between our gateposts with panache. Each time I saw her I'd forgotten how beautiful she was. The legs, which were the first thing about her to attract Ivor, descended from the driving seat in that most elegant way a woman can alight from a car, moving her body to the right in her seat and, with knees pressed together, setting both feet on the ground. It was autumn and she wore a black and white figured skirt with a pure white cardigan. I wondered if I had ever seen a lovelier woman, her black hair cut to fall just below her ears, a fringe coming to just above her eyebrows, her lips painted a deep pink and parting then in a wide smile. It's strange how I could admit her transcendent beauty and yet at the same know that I found my own wife far more attractive. Just as well, I suppose.

  She had stopped on her way to buy the paper in question and read the paragraph. “He'll read it sometime today, you know. He's bound to. You think I ought to phone him, don't you?”

  “I don't know, Juliet. I just think we all ought to be prepared for him to be in a state about this. It's going to be a blow to him.”

  Iris came in then with Joe in her arms. He was trying to walk by this time, though in his case walking meant getting into everything, pulling everything down from its appointed place, and generally making mayhem. Another man, if a little one, to be drawn to her beauty, he came over when she called him and sat on her knee. Iris had told me of Juliet's love for children but I'd never before seen it for myself quite as I did that day. I'd never before seen in her that characteristic of the woman who knows what children want, the bestowing on them of undivided absorbed attention. Nothing, not even Ivor's interests, would have distracted her from Joe, but within seconds he had found her handbag and begun trying to open it. Iris, of course, intervened, feebly expostulating, but Juliet wasn't having that. The handbag was opened, placed on the floor, and abandoned to Joe's excavations.

  “What do you think will happen?” Juliet said.

/>   “Let's hope nothing. If the media find out that Sean was questioned four years ago about Sandy Caxton's murder, they can't use it. But they know that. The trouble is that I can't see any reason why they shouldn't go back into their archives and resuscitate the kidnap story.”

  “Because that would be about Dermot and not about Sean?”

  “That's right. But I do think the chances are they'd concentrate on a kidnap attempt on Kelly Mason rather than on Hebe Furnal. It's never been finally established which woman it was they meant to abduct, or whether it was a real kidnap or a joke. And remember, no one has connected Hebe with Ivor. Ivor hasn't been mentioned. There have been stories about Kelly Mason in the papers, that she was in a psychiatric hospital on some remote island, and there was an interview with her husband saying she hadn't been well since all those threats were made. He meant she hadn't been sane.”

  “You mean they're more likely to concentrate on her,” Iris said, “than on Hebe because the poor woman's gone bonkers? What utter shits they are.”

  “Maybe, but that's how I think it would be.”

  Nadine was at her infant school but Adam marched in then and, seeing his brother intent on removing notes, change, and credit cards from Juliet's purse, snatched it from him, grabbing the handbag with his other hand. Screams and bellows followed from Joe, triumphant laughter from Adam, admonitions from Iris, until peace was restored by Juliet's producing from the plastic bag that the newspaper was in a writing pad and case of colored pencils. In spite of having several sets of pencils and infinite sheets of paper already, Adam fell on this gift with enthusiasm, while abandoning the handbag to Joe.

  “You're really good with kids,” Iris said.

  “If I am I expect it's because I like them.” Juliet smiled. It was always, I'd noticed, a rather shy smile for so beautiful a woman. One expected enormous self-confidence and got diffidence instead. “Please don't say I ought to have some of my own,” she said. “I know it. I'd love to.”

  Iris is notoriously outspoken. I was afraid for a moment she might ask Juliet why she didn't have some of her own, but she didn't, said only that she'd go and make coffee. Like me, she knew the answer. Ivor wouldn't want to be a father without being married first. He was a Conservative and a landowner. He must have been one of the few people left even then who still referred to children whose parents weren't married as “illegitimate.”

  “So you think that may be the end of it?” Juliet said.

  “Well, I do.” I'm not sure that I did. I was trying to comfort her, though I needed comfort myself. “As I say, they can't publish anything about Sean's past, whether he has any convictions or things like that. There's no apparent link with Ivor in any of this.”

  “I can't believe Sean would kill anyone. Why would he?”

  I said I didn't know the man. I couldn't say. But I remembered his thuggish looks from Ivor's party, the brutality in his face, and I wasn't so sure.

  “The difficulty is that Ivor is the link between Jane Atherton and Sean Lynch. Any possibility that Sean's some sort of psychopath who raped and killed a woman he saw in the street and followed home isn't on, is it? It would be too much of a coincidence.”

  “Are you saying Sean killed her to protect Ivor?”

  “I don't know. Did she threaten him in any way? If she did, he said nothing to us about it.”

  “Nor to me,” Juliet said. “I'm sure she didn't. But Sean—I know this sounds an exaggeration but it's not—Sean loves Ivor. I don't mean he just likes him or looks up to him. He said so to me once. ‘I really love that man,' he said. He loves him, he worships him. It's not too much to say he'd do anything for him.”

  “Well, I hope to God he hasn't.”

  “People do love him, don't they? Dermot did in his way. The way Ivor talks about him, I'd say Sandy Caxton loved him too. I do. I do love him so much.” She looked at me and this time there was no smile, diffident or otherwise. The beautiful mouth trembled and she began to cry.

  Iris had just come in with the coffee. She put the tray down, went to Juliet and threw her arms round her. “Don't cry, darling, please don't. It'll be all right. It'll blow over. You'll see.”

  “I don't see how it can.”

  I was thinking, though I didn't say it aloud, that even if it blew over at the present time, when Sean came up for trial—nine months, ten, perhaps a year away—the man's motive must come out and there could be no other motive, it appeared, but saving Ivor from Jane Atherton's malice or greed. Or desperation or need, if I am to be fair.

  “He'll be home by seven,” Juliet said. “He's bound to know by then.” Neither of us had asked, it would have been too much of an intrusion, but it was as if we had. “It sounds silly but it was love at first sight for me. The first time I saw him I thought, I want to marry that man. Well, not the first time, that was at a party, but the second. Whatever happens I'll never leave him. If he wants to get rid of me he'll have to throw me out.”

  “He won't do that,” I said, though I was by no means sure he wouldn't. “Get him to give us a ring when he comes in.” We kissed her and Iris hugged her, holding her tightly for a moment. We had our answer to the question we'd so often asked. Why? What was in it for her? Not for unspoken blackmail, not for a gourmet meal ticket, but love, just love.

  “I was wrong,” Iris said when she'd gone, “about her being unfaithful, wasn't I?”

  IVOR DIDN'T PHONE us that evening, though he knew. He'd seen the relevant newspaper in the plane on the return flight and there were a few lines in the evening paper, rather cunning subtle lines. They said only that Dermot Lynch, driver of “a kidnap car” in which the intended victim had been Kelly Mason, having been in a “protracted coma” for a long time, had made a partial recovery. (As if kidnap, crash, and recovery were all recent history.) Juliet told us about it next morning. She called us after Ivor had gone in to the department. They had both also read the follow-up story in the right-wing daily newspaper Ivor had delivered.

  This was just an account of Sean Lynch's arrest and his appearance in the magistrates' court, where he had pleaded not guilty to the charge of willful murder. There had been, of course, nothing about what led the police to him and no details about him except that he was thirty-three years old (the heavenly number) and lived in Paddington, west London. But at the foot of this brief account of the proceedings, there appeared once again the two lines about Dermot, his involvement in a suspected kidnap attempt, his long period of unconsciousness, and his “limited recovery.” Not a word about any relationship between the two men, nothing to show they had an address in common.

  “How is Ivor taking it?”

  “All right. Not bad. He's tough, you know, Rob. He keeps saying, ‘There's no mention of me. They haven't made the connection and with luck they won't.' He's got a statement to deliver to the House this afternoon and he'll do it. He won't only do it, he'll do it as if he hadn't got a care in the world.”

  But I think he was already making preparations for the action he meant to take. If things got worse, that is, if the connection was made between himself and what three newspapers had called “the kidnap car” and therefore between him and Sean Lynch. I don't mean he was resigned to his name coming into this; not at all, that mustn't be thought of. He hoped with all his strength that the media would stop there. What would happen when Sean came up for trial was a long way off; all sorts of things could happen between now and then. He had to think of the immediate future, the next few days in fact. He told us all this when the four of us met in the evening of the day after he came back from Culdrose.

  He was an optimist, he always was, but a fatalist too, and I could hear it in his voice and, if it doesn't sound too melodramatic, see it in his eyes. It was a kind of foretaste of despair. Things which he had thought—had hoped—had passed away, buried themselves, had only been waiting before they were resurrected. Iris, who is the literary one of us, said it reminded her of a line from Lear: “The gods are just and of our pleasant vices mak
e instruments to plague us.” Well, Ivor had had his pleasant vices all right, but he really thought by now that he had got away from the wrath of the gods.

  “If nothing more has happened by the end of the weekend,” he said across the dinner table, “I've probably got away with it again. It's a funny thing,” he went on, “but when I read that bit in the paper on the flight home last night I had that ghastly feeling of some thing falling out of me. As one does. Like being in a lift when it comes to a stop too fast. And then this morning I read it again and I was used to it. I could take it. It didn't seem so bad. And tonight's Standard— well, there it is again, with a quote from that guy Mason and a photograph of the car after it crashed, and all I thought was, what was I making such a fuss about on the plane last night? You get used to things. I suppose you can get used to anything.”

  “Oh, darling.” Juliet took his hand in both of hers. “Nothing more will happen. You won't have to get used to it. I'm sure it's over.”

  He wasn't sure and I doubt if she was either. When we say we're sure, we mean we doubt but we're hopeful. A look of grimness, of dark resolution, had come into his face and, with hindsight of course, I think, as I've said before, that he was making up his mind then what he would do. We said good night early. They went back to Westminster and we to our Barnet-Hertfordshire borders, where all three children had, for reasons best known to themselves, been giving my mother a hard time.