The Birthday Present

by Barbara Vine

  He lay unconscious and “on the danger list” if there is such a thing. We were allowed to see him for a few minutes after they'd cleaned him up and put him on a transfusion of his own blood group. They didn't know if he'd live or die. When there was nothing more for us to do, we went home to our fidgety babysitter, who was desperate to get away and go out with her boyfriend. The next thing must be to call Louisa and Juliet or just Juliet and leave it to her to tell Louisa.

  “I ought to go and tell Mother myself,” Iris said.

  I said that even if she caught a train in the next hour she wouldn't get to Norwich before midnight. They would have to be told now, at once.

  “I'll do it,” Iris said. “I don't want to but it's the only way.”

  Before she could, Juliet phoned us. She was worried, desperately worried. She'd tried to phone Ivor after she'd seen the BBC early-evening news. Proceedings in the Commons chamber had been televised since 1989 and when she saw Ivor standing at the dispatch box and answering Saddler she'd been stunned. She'd found it unbelievable, “like an awful dream,” the kind where exemplary people find themselves in situations of filth and squalor. All this came out before she could be told and Iris was crying so much that I took the phone from her.

  “He's alive,” I said. “Hold on to that. You must tell his mother.”

  “Where did he do it?”

  It was like the guy in Macbeth who says, “By whom?” when he's told his father's been murdered. I used to think it an irrelevant remark to be made at that point but I didn't when Juliet asked where. Horrible as it was, appallingly distressing, she would want to see Ivor and this act of his in her mind's eye. I found out later the contents of that will. With the exception of Ramburgh House, in which his mother had a life interest, Ivor left everything he possessed to Juliet.

  HIS CONVALESCENCE WAS a close parallel to Dermot Lynch's case. Like him, Ivor lay unconscious for a long time but, as far as I know, no one was wishing him to die, as Ivor had wished for Dermot. His mother sat beside him for long hours, holding his hand. Juliet went every day and Iris and I nearly as often. I don't know exactly what he had done to himself when he pulled that shotgun trigger, only that he had damaged his brain. The consultant in charge of his case described it as being rather like the effect of a severe stroke but, he added, “It might have been a lot worse.”

  The fuss in the media might have been a lot worse too if Ivor hadn't made that suicide attempt. In part, it deflected the newspapers from any involvement he might have had in the kidnap–Jane Atherton–Lynch family–Furnal affair. Of course his action was inseparable from it, but for a few days his attempt to kill himself was predominant in every line. Then those articles by investigative journalists which news stories give rise to, particularly in the Guardian, began to concentrate on various aspects of the events: the kidnap (which most of the media now accepted was no kidnap), the Hebe Furnal–Jane Atherton friendship, the Lynch connection, the Freeman link with particular reference to Juliet, and the incapacity pension, which might be no pension but more likely was blackmail.

  The prospective Independent candidate for Imberwell, Aaron Hunter, wrote a vitriolic piece, citing and condemning sleaze among the Conservatives. Ostensibly, it mentioned various culprits but it was essentially about Ivor, what he called “the whiff of perversion” in the kidnap setup occupying several paragraphs. Hunter said nothing about his marriage to Juliet but other newspapers took him up on it, some congratulating him on his courage and honesty, one censuring him with violence on his cowardice in failing to say that Ivor Tesham's fianceé had been his first wife. Then the cry went up for an inquiry. A commission of independent people with no government or Conservative Party connections must be appointed to look into “the whole sorry affair.” And so it went on while Ivor lay insensible, linked to life by a series of tubes.

  31

  What would have been Sean Lynch's fate if the police hadn't read that diary? The mandatory life imprisonment, I suppose, maybe fifteen years. Jane's diary, which Sheila Atherton eventually gave them, saved him. Of course nothing was ever revealed to the public about its existence. There was no outcry, no shouts about wrongful imprisonment. All that the police did was release Sean to return home to his mother and his brain-damaged brother. He wasn't the man they were looking for. His arrest had been the cause of the revelations about Ivor and his suicide attempt, yet Sean had done nothing unless you count forcibly ejecting Jane from his home where she had made her way in under false pretenses.

  He came out of the prison where he had been on remand a happy man, basking in the prospect of a hundred-thousand-pound offer from a tabloid newspaper for his “astoundingly frank and mind-blowing” story. If Ivor's condition had put an end to the Lynches' pension, they would scarcely have missed it. Though, in fact, it hadn't. He went on paying it for the rest of Dermot's life.

  Another thing I wondered about was if Ivor had inflicted that wound on himself knowing that it might well kill him, but if it didn't it would place him in a similar position to that of Dermot Lynch. He had a conscience, after all. He saw himself as the author of that poor man's sufferings and incapacity and the only thing for him to do about it was become like him. Iris said this was rubbish. It was sentimental, maudlin, and utterly unlike Ivor. Anyway, only some medieval saint would behave like that. Perhaps she is right, I don't know.

  An enormous fuss was made in the newspapers about the whole business of the birthday present, wild conjecture, surprisingly accurate assumptions, new revelations which were entirely the product of journalists' imaginations. But the inquiry that was always hinted at never happened, gradually it all died down and by the time Ivor came out of his coma it was seldom referred to. When it was, in feature articles about sleaze or news items revealing some other member's misdemeanor, he was always mentioned as “the disgraced MP Ivor Tesham,” a description he had once told us he dreaded. I doubt that he read these pieces. Having daily studied newspapers for years, he ceased even to glance at headlines. What the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over.

  But how did David Menhellion know that it was Ivor who had been Hebe's lover? We never knew but, though the diary didn't tell us, there was a hint in its early pages. About five years after I read this I happened to glance at a review of one of the previous evening's television programs. Menhellion, who had become a feature writer for a “quality” Sunday, had been invited on it as a guest reviewer and in the piece he wrote he referred to his own weakness for costume serials. Cozy domestic asides were becoming fashionable, so there was nothing unusual in a columnist bringing in his wife and her preference for docudramas. What was unusual was her Christian name, very uncommon then and now. Jane mentions a Grania as one of Hebe's friends and as Gerry Furnal's helper. It's not too far-fetched to think that they are one and the same and that the Grania Jane met in Irving Road, if not then married to Menhellion, may soon have become his girl-friend, happy to pass on to him what she deduced as to the identity of Hebe's lover or what perhaps Hebe herself had told her.

  IT WAS A long time before Ivor recovered enough to go home. The wound to the side of his head, which had been covered in bandages while he lay unconscious, was at last exposed on a day in September when Iris and I visited the hospital. It was an ugly sight, enough to make you recoil and hope he hadn't seen. He has had several skin grafts since then but he still has a kind of furrow from his temple to his crown and no hair grows on it. As soon as he was back in Glanvill Street he applied for a special license and he and Juliet were married, the bridegroom seated in an armchair, wearing an immaculate suit and a woolly hat to hide the scar.

  Most newspapers carried a photograph from their archives of Ivor and Juliet taken when he first became a Minister of State. Variations on “Disgraced MP weds” were the captions above these pictures, but since newspapers were no longer delivered to his home, Ivor saw none of them. Juliet had longed for this marriage and now she had got it. Did it make her happy? She said she was happy. At thirty-six she w
as more beautiful than ever and in the spring she told us she was pregnant. She adored Ivor and said the happiest day of her life was when she told him he was to be a father. According to her, he wept for joy. I wonder. It's well known that victims of stroke or similar blows to the brain often cry very easily. I can only say that in all the time I've known him, I've never seen tears in his eyes.

  Was it the present Ivor or the memory of what he had been that Juliet loved? Though possibly not moved to tears, he was a changed man. Whether this change was due to the damage the shotgun had done to his brain, a straightforward trauma, or to the punishment he had suffered in the weeks and days before he tried to kill him self, I don't know. Recklessness was gone and panache and that callousness which had been so much a feature of his character, the indifference which had made him wish for Dermot's death and not grieve at all over Hebe's. He had done clever things and stupid things to save his skin and when it was stripped away he had become a little dull. Politics had been the breath of life to him and now he relinquished what he called “all that” apparently without a qualm. Now there could be no question of infidelity to Juliet. And “all that” included other indulgences.

  “I haven't had a drink since I came round,” he said to me. “I don't seem to fancy it.”

  “Many would envy you,” I said.

  “Would they?”

  He gave me a long steady look but said no more. I regretted that remark I'd made, but it was too late. Still, it had provoked nothing but a wistful inquiry. It might, instead, have brought on one of his rages, paroxysms of uncontrolled anger when he would shout and roar, often breaking some ornament by hurling it against the wall. Juliet may have been the recipient of some of this noisy violence, but if she was she never said so. She was entirely loyal to him in word and deed and, I'm sure, in thought too.

  One day, alone with Iris, he talked to her about his suicide attempt. “I know a lot of people think I didn't mean to kill myself,” she told me he'd said to her. “They're wrong. I did. I thought, I can't go on anymore with all that stuff going round in my head. Nothingness would be preferable. I suppose all would-be suicides think like that. That's the essence of it.”

  She asked him if he still felt like that. It was a num question, expecting the answer no, and that's what she got, but it wasn't unqualified. He answered her in that wistful way he often spoke in at that time. “No,” he said. “Oh, no. I have a lot of good things going for me now. And another thing, I've become an ostrich. I turn away and hide my head when unpleasant things happen. I turn off the radio and change TV channels. I shall never look at another newspaper. I save myself. I don't feel in the least tempted to know what's going on.”

  Out in the world where Ivor never went, more precisely in the constituency of Imberwell, the prospective Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates stood down to ensure that Aaron Hunter won the seat as an Independent. I suppose no one thought the Conservative candidate was a threat to him and indeed she wasn't. In the 1997 general election, on his antisleaze ticket, Hunter gained Imberwell with a majority of over twenty thousand.

  Long before that, in 1995, Ivor and Juliet sold the house in Glanvill Street and moved permanently to live at Ramburgh House. There was some question of their having a pied-à-terre in London but neither of them really wanted it and the house in Ivor's old constituency became their only home. Over the years Juliet has done wonders with the shabby gardens and now they are opened to the public on two days during May and June. Louisa and John never redecorated the place or refurbished the furniture but Juliet has done both, showing great taste and a flair for that sort of thing. A good many of the old portraits of ancestors whose names are long forgotten are gone and she and Ivor have replaced them with modern landscapes and a portrait of herself. She wears a full-length red silk gown and is seated, as some eighteenth-century lady might be, with her little daughter standing at her knee and her baby boy in her lap.

  Ivor, who had never been self-conscious, still less felt insecure, was sensitive about being recognized in public, especially if he walked about Westminster, which he had once or twice tried doing. Louisa Tesham gave up the house to him and Juliet, as she had always said she would when Ivor married. She went to live in the lodge that Ivor, in the time of his prosperity, had sometimes called “the dower house;” he did so no longer. He told me he felt quite differently about walking down to Ramburgh village stores or St. Mary's Church from how it was in London. Everyone spoke to him and no one stared. It was the same in Morningford and when he met the woman who had replaced him as member in the by-election—and who lost the seat to Labour two years later—she was courteous and charming and made no reference to his previous incumbency or his subsequent downfall. Imagine the old Ivor caring about someone else's manners or attitude to himself!

  Unlike certain other “disgraced” MPs, he didn't throw himself heart and soul into charity work or adopt some cause to champion.

  “I might run into Gerry Furnal again,” he said with a rare flash of his old sense of fun, “and have to call him out.”

  Something crazy like that was exactly the sort of thing he might have considered doing in his carefree days. More than anyone else I've ever known, I can picture him fighting a duel with swords. I'll correct that and say I can imagine the old Ivor in that role. In Ramburgh he embarked on what was to be a quiet life. He read a lot, began on the research for a life of Lord Palmerston, and, in a modestly luxurious kind of way, entertained old friends at the weekends and in the holidays. Juliet's daughter—I call her that in the mode Ivor had said was used by Evelyn Waugh—was born in the autumn of their first year at Ramburgh and her son a year and a day after the general election in which Labour enjoyed such a huge landslide. We too had our fourth and last child that year, a girl called Isabel, while Ivor and Juliet gave their children Christian names of irreproachable Conservative credentials: Lucy and Robert.

  There have been two coincidences over the years. If they are coincidences. Perhaps they should just be thought of as interesting happenings. My daughter Nadine's schoolfriend Hannah is going out with a boy called Justin Furnal, aged nineteen. It must be the same one. Philomena Lynch had a huge win on the National Lottery about five years ago and, according to the Evening Standard, bought with half the proceeds the house in Hampstead Garden Suburb once owned by Damian and Kelly Mason. Once more the Standard dug up all the dirt about Ivor and Hebe, the Masons and the birthday present, but Ivor up in Norfolk saw none of it.

  Dermot died in that house, a year or so after his mother bought it, and then Ivor ceased to pay the pension. She and Sean had no need of it. Sean has got married and, as far as anyone knows, has become an exemplary citizen. Of the fates of Sheila Atherton, Erica Caxton, and the Trenants I have no knowledge. Nicola Ross has married a Polish count and, like Ivor, has two children. But long before any of this, at the start of 1995, the police found the murderer of Jane Atherton.

  CONSIDERING THEY HAD had Jane's diary for several months by then, they took their time. Perhaps they had too little evidence to proceed. But Jane had been raped, so I would have expected tests to show beyond a doubt that he was guilty. But I don't know. My ignorance on these matters is as profound as that of most law-abiding men, I suppose.

  He was charged, appeared in the magistrates' court in February, and his trial took place at the Central Criminal Court in the following December. No one even remotely connected with this whole business had ever heard of him unless they had read Jane's diary. He was Stuart Thomas Higgs, twenty-eight, a window cleaner of Kensal Rise.

  At the trial details of his association with Jane came out. He had been employed by the managing agents of the building where her flat was to clean the residents' windows inside and out. His counsel suggested that she gave him great encouragement, which is not suggested by the diary. She seems, eventually, to have been attracted to him out of despair, out of resignation to her only hope of finding love and companionship. They went to a pub together, apparently drank a good deal, and sh
e invited him back home with her afterward. As far as they knew. Anyway, he must have been in the flat with her. His counsel told the court that she consented to sex with him, then changed her mind. Higgs had no memory of what happened after that. He said he found himself with one of her kitchen knives in his hand and the two of them there on her bed in a pool of her blood.

  Higgs was sentenced to life imprisonment, as was mandatory, with a recommendation that he should serve a minimum of fifteen years. This means he should be out in three years' time.

  UNANSWERED QUESTIONS REMAIN Would Jane have attempted to blackmail Ivor? It must have been a large sum she meant to extract from him if she expected to live on it for the rest of her life. She seemed very determined. Would Ivor have agreed to what she asked? I have never mentioned that aspect of things to him. As far as I know, he isn't aware of the existence of the diary. Juliet has read it but she is even less likely than Iris and I are to tell him of it. Why did Der-mot Lynch drive across that Hendon junction fast and against a red light? A suggestion was made when I told the tale to a psychiatrist friend of Iris's, heavily disguised and with the names changed, that Dermot, a single and perhaps celibate man, had been overstimulated sexually by tying Hebe up and putting handcuffs and a gag on her while his own face was covered. This would perhaps have led to his total loss of control.

  Having shown himself a master of drama in the handing back of the pearls, why did Gerry Furnal do nothing more? Why did he never speak to the media? Why did his wife never speak to them? Well, I have the impression he was always a quiet, reserved sort of man, the antithesis of what Ivor had been. As for her, no doubt she kept silent to please him.

  What became of the pearls?

  We spent last Christmas with Ivor and Juliet and their children at Ramburgh House. Over eighty by now, Louisa was there with her live-in carer and the Munros with their daughters. Some cousins of Iris and Ivor's came and Juliet's brother with his girlfriend, so we sat down twenty to Christmas dinner. Juliet, a little heavier than she had been— she always ate heartily—but as beautiful as ever, was in black with pearls. According to Ivor she had said she “didn't do pearls,” but here she was wearing a string of them, large flawless pearls.