The Birthday Present (10 page)

I said, “What do you want to talk about?” and she said, “Did you know Hebe was having an affair?”

So I wasn't the only one she had confided in. I said nothing, just kept very still.

She looked at me with her head a bit on one side. She is a tall, thin woman, about thirty, with long, dark hair. Her jeans were very tight and her heels were very high and it looked as if bending over to pick Justin up might have been a problem.

“I phoned once or twice in the evenings and she wasn't in. Gerry said she was out with you. It must have been three times I phoned and that's what he said. I thought it a bit strange Hebe going out with a woman in the evening. She could have seen you in the daytime or the weekends, couldn't she?”

“What do you want me to say, Grania?”

“I don't know what you mean by that,” she said, looking offended. “I asked her. She said he was a VIP and something in the government and it was bound to come out into the open some time but to keep it dark for now.”

I said I knew nothing about it and then I went to find Justin. But it proved one thing to me, that I was no more important to Hebe than she was. Justin was in the living room, sitting on the floor, surrounded by the contents of his toy
box, saying, “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,” in a singsong but not obviously unhappy voice. When he saw me he rolled over onto his front and stuffed his fists into his eyes.

By the time I went back on Thursday Gerry had left for work and this time the woman-in-residence, the Justin-carer, was Lucy Compton, who was one of Hebe's bridesmaids. I was the other one. We must have looked ludicrous in our pale blue satin and wreaths of cornflowers, for Lucy is five feet ten and I am five feet two. But she was a welcome change from Grania. I didn't mind her. On Monday I had thought I was Hebe's best friend, her closest woman friend, but now I was beginning to doubt it. Justin behaved with her as if he was used to her being in the house: let her pick him up and cuddle him; as soon as she sat down, went to her and climbed on her knee.

It makes me feel like Hebe deceived me, the way she deceived everyone, letting me think I was really important to her. I may as well be honest and not pretend. I feel rejected, jealous of her because of Hebe as well as Justin. The past is being destroyed, made to mean something different from what I'd thought, and I wonder if Hebe just made a convenience of me, if I wasn't important to her at all. I was useful because I agreed to provide an alibi for her whereas perhaps these others didn't. Maybe she had asked Lucy but Lucy wouldn't. I waited for her to ask me if I knew Hebe was having an affair but she didn't, she just said a lot of very conventional things about how terrible it is to die young and what a tragedy for Gerry and Justin.

When I could escape from these platitudes I went upstairs to begin my task of clearing out Hebe's clothes, but first I went to the drawer where I know she kept her jewels. There was a lot of junk in there, necklaces mostly, which I wouldn't dignify with the name of costume jewelry, and a
small plastic box containing the engagement ring, the locket, and the bracelet. I'd brought three large plastic bin bags with me and a carrier. The junk went into the carrier and I felt in the back of the drawer and brought out the flat black leather case in which the pearls were lying on a bed of pink velvet.

They were beautiful but could I say they were more beautiful than any you see in a chain store? I couldn't and I know Gerry couldn't. She'd told him they came from the British Home Stores and he took her word for it without question. I wondered what Ivor Tesham paid for them. A thousand pounds? Five? More? I sat down on the bed, which Gerry said he hadn't slept in since she died, and I began thinking a lot of thoughts that are bad and base, not to say criminal. Do other people think like this when temptation comes in their way? Do they consider possibilities that would land them in court, in prison? Or do such things never cross their minds because they are honest, they are
good
people who, if these possibilities were suggested to them, would simply shake their heads and smile? Well, I expect I'd be good and all smiles if I'd had their luck and their chances, but life hasn't been very fair to me, to say the least.

Who would know if I took these pearls to a jeweler and asked him to value them? And when he had valued them said to him, will you buy them from me? Gerry believes what Hebe told him about where they came from. As far as he knows or cares, they are worth no more than the string of red glass beads I had just dropped into the carrier. He will expect them to disappear along with the beads and the carved-wood bracelet and the plastic lapel pin. My parents gave me the deposit on the studio flat I live in but I have a mortgage and I am poor. The library pays me a wage— it calls it a salary—not much more than half the national
average and my (late) father called it disgraceful for a woman with an upper second from a good university. My car once belonged to my parents, who gave it to me when they bought a new and better one. The furniture in the flat is their castoffs.

I would like a new car and a new carpet and a decent big TV. I'd like some clothes and not the sort that come from Dorothy Perkins. I didn't have to decide then and there, I could think about it, but there was no reason why I shouldn't take the pearls home with me. After all, if I left them behind, one of these friends of Hebe's, whoever was on duty next day, some other greedy gossip, might go rooting about in this room and find them and take them home with her.

I'd brought my handbag upstairs with me and I put the pearls in their case inside it. I didn't have to decide. I didn't even have to think about it, but I did think about it. I couldn't help myself. I'm still thinking about it now. A jeweler might refuse to buy them from me unless I could prove they're mine and I have a right to them. I've heard that's what happens. I took the case out of the bag again and read on the underside of it that the pearls were bought from As-prey's. I know where Asprey's is, it's in Bond Street. Suppose I were to be very bold and tell the jeweler they were given to me by Ivor Tesham and if he wanted to check Mr. Tesham would confirm it? Would he confirm it? I think so. He would if he was afraid I'd tell Gerry he was Hebe's lover.

I read two significant items in my paper this morning. One was that Tesham has been made a junior minister in the Department of Defence and the other is that the police had found a gun in the wreckage of the crash car. I am wondering now if those men in the car
really
made a mistake when they took Hebe. She was going to Tesham, she told me so;
she was going to be taken there in a car and given her birthday present. It looks like he paid them to fetch her but he can't have done. He wouldn't have had a gun, not an MP— would he?

I started going through her clothes. I took them off their hangers in the clothes cupboard and laid them on the bed: light summer dresses, miniskirts, T-shirts, tops, jeans, a couple of coats, no rain coat. Women like Hebe don't have raincoats, they totter on high heels holding up small umbrellas and getting wet, squealing because the rain is spoiling their hair. Did Gerry never look in this cupboard? I suppose not. At the back, behind the shoes, mostly strappy things with high heels, was a small case standing on the bottom of the cupboard. I opened it and I was shocked. But not only shocked. I thought, I have found the excitement I thought I had lost.

A
DOG COLLAR
of black leather with spikes is the first thing I see. There are thigh boots—not the lace-up ones, she was wearing them—and crotchless knickers and platform bras, fishnet stockings, a black lace corselette. A black leather miniskirt, very brief, a corset with suspenders, the kind of things you see in Ann Summers's windows if you look, only I don't look for more than half a minute. Why would I? They aren't for women like me. I give them a quick glance and then look away. Because all this stuff gives me a strange feeling that I don't want. I hate it, I disapprove of it, but it excites me. And not in a way that I like. If I feel desire, I mean sexual desire, I want to feel it for someone, not like this, a kind of intense but undirected longing—for what? For myself? To be touched by
anyone?
It wouldn't matter who.

I didn't take the things out of the case. There was more
underneath I didn't even look at. I could feel a pulse beating in my chest. I was breathless and if Lucy had come in I don't think I could have spoken. I closed the lid and fastened it and put the case inside one of the plastic bin bags. What I'm going to do with it and its contents I didn't know. I still don't know. Temporarily, the pearls had gone out of my head.

The bin bags and the carrier and my handbag I took downstairs and put them in the boot of my car. Lucy had gone out with Justin. I walked about downstairs a bit, thinking how Gerry had wanted me with him and would have gone on wanting me if those other girls hadn't interfered. I thought then that I'd probably seen him for the last time. As for Justin, he used to like me, we always got on all right. I suppose the truth is his father has turned him against me, or Grania and Lucy have. But this sort of thing is always happening to me. I ought to be used to it by now. I wrote a note for Lucy, saying I'd taken all the clothes and to tell Gerry I'd dispose of them, and I left without a backward glance.

A
T HOME IN
the evening with nothing to do and nowhere to go as usual, I looked at the pearls again, at the creamy pallor of them, the delicate bloom which is on all pearls, real or cultured or fake. But I wasn't really thinking about them, I was thinking about Ivor Tesham. He would have left the House of Commons by this time and be at home in his flat in Old Pye Street, Westminster. Unless he had gone out. I pictured him leading an exciting life, dizzy and expensive, in clubs and at premières, very unlike my own—the sort I don't know much about apart from what I read in the papers. A new girl would be with him, for I don't suppose he was being faithful to Hebe's memory. He and his life are so different from me and mine that we might belong not just to
different sexes but to different species. Unlike me and Gerry. We are the same sort of people. I'm much more his sort of woman than Hebe was. She was like Tesham or would have got like him if she had lived a bit longer. I suddenly see them together in a luxurious bedroom, she in that corselette and that dog collar and he gazing at her, a picture I squeeze my eyes shut to escape. That man frightens me and makes me shiver, but I knew then that I couldn't let him get away from me and disappear from my life.

It was several evenings later, and my holiday that was no holiday from the library was over, when I phoned him. I'd put the pearls away in a drawer but I got them out and looked at them every day, and they seemed to me not just beautiful but a weapon of power. When I was a child and afraid of someone, Mummy used to say to me, “They can't eat you.” Ivor Tesham couldn't eat me. I'd forgotten his number but it was in the phone book. This time when I'd looked it up I wrote it down on the pad I keep by the phone.

When I'd spoken to him before he'd made me feel naïve. I'm not naïve now, I've changed and grown older. I'd started crying too and now that seems ridiculous. I picked up the phone and dialed the number on the pad, but before anyone answered I put the receiver back and tried to think a bit more about what I was doing and what I was going to say when I spoke to him. If I did. Should I just trust to the inspiration of the moment? I poured myself a glass of wine and sat by the phone, thinking. I was conscious of a new feeling, something I'd never felt before. It was a sense of power and it came to me through the pearls. I fetched them in their case, opened it and touched them. I can have power over Ivor Tesham, over a Minister of the Crown, a law-maker. And not quite knowing what it is he had in mind when he got those two men to pick up Hebe in the street, that didn't
matter. He won't know that I don't precisely know, only that I know he is involved, a major actor in the play.

I remembered his voice and his suave tones, his photograph in
Dod's,
his biographical details (Eton and Brasenose, called to the Bar), where he was and where I was. For he is rich and good-looking, a Member of Parliament, some kind of minister, increasingly powerful, while I belong to an invisible group, the ignored women that most people don't know exist in the 1990s. In the 1890s, yes, they'd say, but not now. Not sixty years after all women got the vote, after the success of the feminist movement, after no profession is closed to them and equal pay is coming. But we are there and in our thousands. We go to bed alone and get up alone, go to work on a bus or a tube, eat a sandwich for lunch alone or with another similarly placed woman, go home by bus or tube to a tiny flat or a room in a shared flat. The highlight of the week is a film we see with the flat-sharer. There are few or no men in our lives because we never meet any. The men at work are married or engaged or living with someone. We have all, of course, had at least one affair or a two-or three-night stand, with a married man whose guilt or fear soon deprived us of his company. Weekends that mean so much to the attached, the ones with lovers or husbands and families, are our worst days and afternoons our worst time. None of us is much to look at, of course, none of us has charm or that vitality men like. As we approach thirty and pass it we know there are no unmarried men left for us and there will be no children except the sort that come out of a bottle. I don't suppose Ivor Tesham has given a thought to a single one of us, the faceless tribe, except, as in my case, to whether we can provide alibis for his married girlfriend when she comes to prance about his bedroom in lace-up boots and frilly camisoles.

I was just going to dial that number when the phone rang. I hoped it might be Gerry but, of course, it was Mummy. How had the funeral gone?

“It went,” I said. “What do you expect?”

There was no need for me to speak like that, she said, she was only making a simple inquiry. It wouldn't be right if she didn't take an interest. “How is he taking it?”

I said he was all right. It hadn't been a very happy marriage.