The Birthday Present (26 page)

I used, with some relish, the clichéd phrase from a hundred bad books and plays: “I expect there's a perfectly simple explanation.”

“There can't be. Hebe couldn't have bought them. She hadn't any money. She never even worked. Someone must have given them to her.”

“What does Gerry say?”

“He doesn't know. I haven't told him.”

I asked her why not.

“Isn't it obvious? He—well, he cherishes her memory. I don't mind that. I understand how he worshipped her. It means he's a good husband, doesn't it? Someone gave her those pearls and—well, come on, he didn't give them to her because he'd admired her from afar.”

“I don't know,” I said, and I asked her what she was going to do.

“Perhaps nothing. Can I tell him and destroy his illusions? And yet—look, Jane, we could do with the money. It was very expensive, moving. And we've got this baby coming. We could sell those pearls for six thousand, maybe more. It frightens me sometimes to think we've got them in the house.”

She went on like this for a long time, torn between keeping her precious Gerry in ignorance, to preserve his unsullied love, and longing for the money. She wanted to know if I had known about it.

“You were a close friend of Hebe's,” she said. “Didn't she tell you she'd a lover? Didn't she say anything about the pearls?”

I said that what Hebe had confided in me was a sacred trust. Pandora liked that. It's the sort of high-flown stuff she indulges in herself. But it made her more suspicious, as I knew it would. As she was leaving, I said, “Oh, by the way, that photo you sent, it's not mine. The writing on the back is Hebe's.”

“Hebe's? Are you sure?”

I looked sad, said, “She was my best friend, Pandora.”

“I don't like to ask, but do you know who the man is?”

Shaking my head, I said, “That's easily found. The paper looks like
The Times
to me.”

She left after that, still uncertain what to do. I think her love of money will overcome her scruples eventually. And it
won't only be her love of money. Whatever she says, she'd prefer Gerry to be disillusioned about Hebe, she'd rather his memories of his first wife were spoiled, because then he'd be bound to love her more.

I
F I LOOK
facts squarely in the face, I don't think I'm ever going to get a job. Well, I could go out cleaning, I could be someone's gardener, but even if I could bring myself to do such a job, I wouldn't earn enough to pay the mortgage. Mummy is still paying it, just as she's paid for the car repairs and, come to that, pays for me. Now I've got nothing in the bank I'm thinking of going on benefit and then the Department of Social Security would pay the interest on my mortgage. Does that mean I stay on it for the rest of my life? At any rate, till I'm sixty? Thirty years of living on the dole?

Gerry Furnal has brought me to this. No, that's not quite right. I have to go back further than that. Ivor Tesham has brought me to it. He was the one who arranged the mock kidnap in which Hebe died. It's because Hebe was dead I went to work for Gerry Furnal and be Justin's nanny. If she had lived I would still have lost my job at the Library of British History but I would have got another. It was those years out of the job market, years doing a menial task out of the goodness of my heart, that wrecked my chances. Someone was behind it, but was it Ivor Tesham or just those two men in the car? He or they started the chain reaction, he set the ball in motion, gathering snow as it rolled down the hill. And now he is successful, rich and happy, living with his lover in a beautiful house, tipped in the newspapers for high office and a seat in the Cabinet, while I am poor and jobless and forgotten. Friendless too and dependent on my mother.

I sit here alone in the evenings thinking about it and wishing
I knew a little more. I don't know enough about these things. I don't know if the police tell the newspapers about something like that. If they do he may have been afraid it would get into the papers. Is that what he meant when he asked what was I going to do? It must have been. The police soon thought it was Kelly Mason they meant to kidnap and by then maybe it was too late for him to tell.

There was a gun in it somewhere, but I don't know whose or where it came from. He can't have meant to shoot anyone. Perhaps it was there to frighten Hebe. But why would he want to frighten her? Apart from Ivor Tesham, one person only knows what he meant to do with the gun. And there is just this one person who can tell me, if he's still alive, if he can tell anyone anything.

W
HY DO
I want to know? I have to have money. There are more ways of getting it than by having a job or living on benefit or being helped out by one's relations. Once the idea of asking for money in order to keep quiet about a secret would have been something I had read about in books or seen someone doing in a sitcom. I wouldn't have seen it as applying to me.

But I have tried to get a job and I feel sick when I have to ask Mummy or take it without asking. I haven't come down to going on benefit yet, but I will if it's a choice between that and starving. The one thing that remains no longer looks unreal. It looks like an option worth serious consideration. He has a secret, and probably by now more secrets piled on top of it, that he wants kept and he has a lot of money. I know the secret and won't tell a newspaper what it is if he pays me money. It's a simple exchange, a business transaction.

I can't sleep. I haven't been able to sleep since I dreamed Callum came into this room, in the night, in the dark, with a big dog on a lead. I knew it was Callum, though I have never pictured him, not even when I first invented him for Mummy. He looks a bit like Ivor Tesham and a bit like Gerry Furnal. He let the dog go and it jumped onto my bed with a low groan. I woke up screaming.

T
he Bosnian crisis and a lot of IRA activity had kept Ivor busy throughout much of 1993. He was always on his feet in the chamber, constantly the subject of media political comment, and a broadsheet newspaper had carried a full-page profile of him in March with a lot of personal stuff about his “beautiful home” and his “attractive companion, Juliet Case.” He battled with John Humphrys on the
Today
program and if he didn't win, he wasn't ignominiously vanquished either. In April, on that late-night program
The Question of the Hour,
he boasted about John Major's recent assertion that the country was beginning to see economic recovery, though this wasn't his area of expertise, and said that “things were getting quite sharply better,” citing the fall in unemployment figures.

Next day he had just got out of his government car in the City when an IRA bomb exploded fifty yards from him. It was half past ten in the morning and he was about to go into a meeting. The bomb knocked him flat but he was otherwise unharmed. Others weren't so fortunate. One person was
killed, forty were injured, and damage was estimated at a thousand million pounds. Ivor got his picture in all the papers this time and quotes from him about his own luck and his distress at the loss of life. He was becoming quite famous.

His picture was in the papers again when he was among the NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels to discuss the Vance–Owen peace plan, aimed at finding a lasting solution to the situation in the Balkans. They got a shot of his elegant figure mounting the steps into the aircraft at Heathrow, apparently preferring a photograph of him to one of the Secretary of State. He was certainly better-looking. Three days before this John Major had carried out a large-scale reorganization of government, replacing Norman La-mont as Chancellor of the Exchequer with Kenneth Clarke, who had been Home Secretary. Michael Howard was the new Home Secretary and John Gummer took his job at Environment. There were other steps upward, but nothing for Ivor. Optimistic as always, he refused to be downhearted. He was young yet, the government was more popular in his opinion than it had been for a long time, they would get back in at the next election. So the months had passed without promotion, without change.

It was probably all these pictures of him in the papers that led to Beryl Palmer ringing his front doorbell and asking for his autograph.

“But that must have been rather nice, wasn't it?” Iris said when he told us.

“Yes and no,” he said. “I'm not exactly a celebrity. It was something of a novelty. I don't believe I've ever been asked for my autograph before. She wanted it for her granddaughter, had the child's album with her.”

I asked him who she was.

He was reluctant to tell us yet he had to tell us once he'd started. That, after all, was the point of his starting. But I knew that look of his and Iris knew it. It presaged the revealing of something of which he wasn't proud, if not exactly ashamed.

“It worried me rather. I mean, it was quite flattering and all that. It was really
who
she was.”

“All right. Who was she?”

“She used to clean the flat next to mine in Old Pye Street—well, she cleaned several flats in the building. She was walking along here one day and she saw me come out of my house and recognized me.”

“Ivor,” said Iris, “who is she?”

“She's Hebe's aunt.”

Iris said she didn't understand. How did he know she was Hebe's aunt? Did she tell him? And that meant …

“Precisely. I must say, you're uncommonly slow on the up take today. Hebe's mother is her sister, though apparently she doesn't have much to do with the family, though she did”—he hesitated—”go to Hebe's funeral. She told me she was coming out of the flat on my floor about four years ago and Hebe got out of the lift.”

“Surely Hebe didn't tell her where she was going?”

“I don't quite see what else she could have done, do you?”

“Does it matter, Ivor?”

He hesitated. “I don't know. Of course I'd rather a woman like that—never mind. It probably doesn't matter.”

His look of distaste, I'm sure, was caused more than anything else by his former girlfriend's aunt being a cleaner. Yet, however out of touch Beryl Palmer was with her family, she must know of Hebe's death and the circumstances of that death. He thought he detected something in the woman's expression he didn't quite like as she told him about the
meeting with Hebe outside his flat, a knowing look, a sidelong glance that spoke more than words could of a naughty secret.

“You signed her grandchild's book?”

“Yes. I kept thinking this child must be Hebe's cousin. She didn't say anything about Hebe's death and I thought very little of it at the time, but afterward it seemed rather strange. No, it seemed very strange. It was the obvious thing to mention, yet she didn't. And, well, I didn't. Perhaps I should have.”

“I suppose you invited her in,” I said.

“Of course. I more or less had to. She said she'd been in the Commons once or twice to hear me speak.”

“But I thought she only recognized you when she saw you come out of this house.”

“I know. It was all a bit odd.”

C
ANDIDATES ARE OFTEN
selected a considerable time before an expected general election. The deadline for the next one was May 1997 and Ivor, the sitting member, almost without question, was the Conservatives' choice for Morningford. No surprise there and no surprise perhaps that Aaron Hunter was standing again and once more with that bound-to-lose label, Independent. The difference this time was that he was standing for the constituency of Imberwell, an industrial town and port on the coast of Lincolnshire. In an inter view he gave to the
Guardian,
he said that his grandfather had come from Imberwell and his cousin was the leader of Imberwell Borough Council. He had strong family ties to the place.

He also said in the interview that he stood for uprightness and decency in public life and against sleaze, of which there
had recently been in the government an unacceptable amount. This sort of thing is always a challenge to certain areas of the press and one scurrilous right-wing newspaper tried to dig dirt out of his past, but without much success. Aaron Hunter was a respectable husband and father of three children; all they could find prior to his marriage was that he had once been married to Juliet Case and divorced eight years before. Juliet Case, the newspaper added, was now the “companion” of Defence Minister Ivor Tesham.

This made Ivor furiously angry, though without much cause, as far as I could see. What did it amount to, after all? No one had said a word against him. “Hunter must have told them about Juliet,” he said. “How would they otherwise know? Anyway, he hasn't a hope in hell of getting in. The Imberwell electorate aren't going to vote for him just because his cousin's on the council. We've never had a member for Imberwell, though of course we've got a very sound candidate. The present Labour man's standing down, he's nearly seventy, but there's a very strong young Labour candidate and the Lib Dem'll put up a good fight. You'll see.”

“Ivor couldn't care less about Labour and Lib Dem candidates,” Iris said after he'd gone. “What's bothering him is calling Juliet his ‘companion.' He knows it's not doing him any good living with a woman he's not married to, and the closer we come to the election the worse it'll get.”

He had paid us a flying visit—all his visits were flying now, he was always on the move—to see his new nephew. He described him as a “handsome bruiser.”

“He'd better be,” he'd said. “He's bound to be a gangster with a name like Joe Delgado.”

Iris asked him if he didn't sometimes think he'd like “one like that” of his own.

“Women may think along those lines,” was all he said. “Men don't.”

“Robin does.”

“I read an article about Evelyn Waugh in which he was quoted as mentioning each new child he fathered as ‘my wife's baby.' I expect I shall be like that.”

“Really. And when will that be?”

“Oh, in about twenty years' time.”

O
NCE HE HAD
begun paying the ten thousand a year to the Lynch family, I believe Ivor had more or less ceased to worry about the events of May 1990 ever coming out. It wasn't blackmail. It was no more blackmail than Juliet's living with him and, presumably, being entirely supported by him were blackmail. Her love for him was undoubted. She showed it in every glance, in every touch, in every hand laid lightly on his sleeve, every word spoken to him. If he liked sprightly tongued women with a provocative turn of phrase like Hebe Furnal or prettily affected actressy women like Nicola Ross, he hadn't found one in Juliet. She was warm and sweet and she loved him. She loved looking after him, refusing help in the house except when they gave a big party. If he hadn't paid much attention to our children—affairs of state keeping him at a distance—she often came to see them and was particularly keen on bathing Nadine and Adam. With Joe in her arms, she looked like some Spanish painter's Madonna. No, her presence in Ivor's life had nothing to do with blackmail. And nor, apparently, had Sean Lynch's.