The Birthday Present (4 page)

The funeral was a highly emotional affair, attended by
most of the country's great and good. Among the coffin bearers were three Cabinet ministers and two university vice-chancellors. Though May, it was a bitterly cold day, a north wind driving the rain and the trees in the little village churchyard swaying and lashing their branches like angry arms, as Ivor put it. They played “The Dead March” in
Saul,
this being Sandy's favorite piece of music, and it seems he was particularly fond of the story of Saul, Samuel, and the Witch of Endor. There's no accounting for tastes. Why, incident ally, do we always talk about Handel arias and other music being “in”
Saul
or
Theodora
or whatever it is, when they are “from” if it's works by Mozart, say, or Beethoven? Nobody has ever been able to tell me.

Ivor came up to Hampstead after the funeral, accepted a stronger drink than usual, brandy with a splash of soda, and said in gloomy tones that he was so depressed by what had happened that he felt like postponing or even canceling the birthday present. But he couldn't do that. He'd fixed it up with Hebe to see her on Friday the eighteenth and arranged things with Lloyd and Dermot.

Iris said surely he'd be better by that time, it was nearly two weeks off. And it was only his usual assignation with Hebe, wasn't it, apart from its taking place in our house and her being fetched by car?

“Not quite usual,” Ivor said, putting on his secretive look but not the little smile this time. “There will be complications. But I'll tell you all about it when it's over.”

“Not
all
about it, I hope.”

“You know what I mean,” Ivor said, using a phrase I'd never heard from him before, his use of which I put down to his feeling low.

He didn't stay long but went off to Old Pye Street in a taxi, saying he had a lot of paperwork to get through before
the following morning. After he'd gone Iris said, “I do wonder about this Hebe, this mystery woman. What do you think she says to her husband when she goes off on these jaunts? Does she tell him she's going to the cinema? I should think she must do, because I can't think of anywhere else a
respectable
young woman with a husband and a child could go to on her own. I mean, could
say
she was going to on her own.”

I said I supposed she might say she was going somewhere with a friend. To have a meal, for instance, or even to a club.

“Then the friend must be an accomplice. The friend will have to be prepared with a story in case Hebe's husband meets her—it must be a her, mustn't it, or maybe a gay man—so that she can say how much they loved the film or the food. I can't imagine telling you I was going to the cinema when I was actually going to go to bed with another man. I don't think I could get the words out.”

“I hope you won't go to bed with another man,” I said.

“I'm sure I never shall, but if I did I'd tell you. Why does she stay with him? Because he keeps her? That's a bit low, isn't it?”

“The whole thing is low,” I said, “and Ivor knows it. But he's fascinated by her. He doesn't love her, but he wants to keep on with this. It may be that she stays with Gerry what's-his-name—Furnal—not because she loves him but because he loves her. For all we know, he may have some idea of all this but begs her not to leave him. Do what she likes but not leave him.”

Iris looked doubtful. She couldn't imagine it. “But to have that between them,” she said. “For her to know she lies to him and him to wonder if she does but be afraid to ask, what kind of marriage is that? I don't think you can be right, Rob.”

I was wrong, as it happened. It was true that Gerry Furnal loved Hebe, but perhaps without knowing the kind of
woman he loved. He seems to have put her on a pedestal and worshipped what he'd created. It's quite a common way of going on, but it wouldn't suit realists like me. Anyway, I doubt if I'm capable of that amount of self-delusion. I'm not well endowed with imagination. The truth came out grimly and shockingly in the end in poor Jane's diaries, if it was the truth rather than only what she saw through the distorting lens of her self-pity. As to Jane, she was the friend who agreed to deceive Gerry Furnal by supplying him, if these became necessary, with ostensible reasons for Hebe's absences, and it wasn't to be long before we heard about her from Ivor. It was Iris who first used the word, calling this then unknown person “the alibi lady.”

“We all use it,” I remember saying, “but do we know what it means? I don't. Alibi—strange word, a sort of police word, but do the real police actually use it?”

“It sounds Arabic.”

I looked it up and found it was Latin for
elsewhere.

“Well, that figures,” Iris said. “The alibi-ist will tell Gerry Furnal Hebe was with her when in fact Hebe was elsewhere with Ivor. And there'll be lots of times when she won't have to, because I don't suppose she and Gerry meet that often. I wonder how she feels about it.”

“I imagine she tells herself her loyalty is to Hebe and not to Hebe's husband.”

“Do you know, Rob, I'm beginning to take an unhealthy interest in all this intriguing and I think I'd better stop.”

And stop she did. We had other things to think about. We told each other so and made a kind of pact, which we stuck to fairly well, not to speculate anymore about Ivor and his clandestine affair. We would lend him our house as we'd promised and go away and leave him to it. I had given him the key the evening he came over after Sandy Caxton's funeral
and he was to put it through the letter box after he left. That isn't to say we didn't involve ourselves much more closely when things developed. We had to. Otherwise he'd have been quite alone, bearing it alone—until, that is, Juliet Case came along.

That Friday was the first day something about poor Sandy wasn't on our daily newspaper's front page. Instead, the lead story was about the multimillionaire Damian Mason's bid to buy some north of England football team, with a picture of him, a short heavy man with a little beard, and his wife, Kelly, in shorts and a tight T-shirt. Iris was beginning to get over her flu, and I think that was the first morning she woke up feeling well. Nadine, on the other hand, was a bit fractious and cross but seemed well enough, so, after I'd made a couple of essential phone calls to clients, we set off for Monks Cravery. Before we left, Iris changed the sheets on our huge low bed and, though I said not to bother, covered up the coffee or birthing stain with a rug from Nadine's room.

It was a lovely day, the first really fine day of spring.

I
started writing this down because I had a premonition. It was when Hebe asked me to give her an alibi. She has been asking me to give her alibis for a long time and I always do, but this one was different. It was more important than any I had given her in the past. For one thing, I would have to provide it for longer than usual and the occasion was her birthday. I mean that where she was going and what she was doing were her birthday present.

When she said that, I had a sense of foreboding. Things would go wrong. My premonition told me things would go disastrously wrong. I would have to be careful. That was when I decided to record events. I am not going to use a notebook but sheets of paper and clip them together as I go and put them in a shoebox, which I shall keep in the only real cupboard I have in this tiny flat. And if I move one day I shall take it with me. Shoeboxes are a nuisance and these days most shops ask you when you buy a pair of shoes if you want the box. Hardly anyone does want it, which makes one
wonder what the shops do with all those hundreds, thousands, millions of boxes. The last pair of shoes I bought they made me take the box—I shan't go there again—and that's how I happen to have one to keep this record in.

Using this box is quite appropriate, because when I bought those shoes Hebe was with me and she bought a pair of boots. Maybe I should say I was with Hebe, because that's the way it always felt. The boots were black patent leather with very high heels and they laced all the way up the front to the knee.

“You won't be able to walk in them,” I said.

She laughed. “I don't want to walk in them, Janey. I want to lie down in them.”

Remarks like that embarrass me. I don't know where to look.

We went to have a coffee and that was when she started telling me about the kinds of things she did with Ivor Tesham. Dressing up, acting out fantasies it was mostly, and that was all right, I suppose, but her descriptions of what after all amounted to S&M made me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it was partly because it all seemed so distant from Gerry, who is a rather proper sort of person. Or so I thought then. I didn't really know. But nothing that's happened since has made me change my view. I asked her if she was in love with Ivor.

“I don't think so,” she said. “But would I know if I was? I do fancy him like crazy. But as for love—I thought I was in love with Gerry when I married him and maybe I was, but it didn't last.”

I asked her why she stayed with him.

“I tell myself it wouldn't be right to take Justin away from his dad, but I don't know if that's really the reason. I've
never had a job, you know. Well, of course you know. I married Gerry straight after finals and then Justin came along. What could I do?”

“Your degree's in media studies,” I said, another obvious remark.

“Like a million other people's. I wouldn't know how to get a job on a paper or in TV or whatever. I'm only good at one thing. I'd be a great whore, but I'd rather go on as I am.”

I reverted to the boots. Surely she wouldn't let Gerry see them? They had cost three times as much as my shoes.

“Oh, Ivor will pay for them,” she said. “After all, they're for his pleasure,” and she drew out the soft sibilant of that sensual word, rolling it on her tongue. “So would you be an angel and give me an alibi for May eighteenth?”

I said I would. “But your birthday's the seventeenth.”

“I've got to go out with Gerry that night.” She made a face. “You're babysitting—remember? It's a bore, but marriage is a bore. You have to face it.”

I had nothing to say to that. “I've got a feeling that something bad is going to happen. Can't you make it another night?”

“Oh, Janey, you and your premonitions. Ivor wants to make it the eighteenth and I can't exactly tell him it won't suit
you.
Besides, I've already told Gerry that you and I are going to the theater.”

Without even asking me. I ought to be used to it, it's the way most people treat me. Starting with Mummy, they all know that if I am not with them I'm not likely to be going anywhere. It's a funny thing really. You read in the papers about young people going to raves and clubs, out every night, being promiscuous, drinking too much and taking drugs. Well, I'm young, but I don't even know what a rave is. I could count on the fingers of one hand how many men
have asked me out, and as for the number who have wanted to see me again—well, I won't go on. There's no point.

In actual fact, I have seldom had to give Hebe an alibi. I hardly ever saw Gerry, so I wasn't around for him to ask me if we'd had a good time at the Odeon or a nice dinner at the Café Rouge. He never actually checked. I mean he never rang up and asked if Hebe had really been with me. Probably he suspected nothing. Not then. It took a good deal to make him even mildly suspicious, for he had a trusting nature. Did my conscience trouble me? I used to have one, but maybe I don't anymore. Spending so much of the time alone deadens things, and one of the things it kills is conscience. It makes you simply not care anymore.

I'd never done this sort of thing before, and in fact I did very little of it for Hebe. Of course I promised various things, like not to answer the phone if it rang when she and I were supposed to be out somewhere but to put it on message, and to be aware of when and where Gerry thought we had gone so that if we did meet I could confirm our date. But that only happened twice, him asking what the film he thought we'd been to had been like and another time how Mummy was—she'd been in the hospital—when I took Hebe to see her. I didn't even have to lie about that. I only had to say that my mother was getting on well.

So it wasn't too much of a strain and it only happened once every two or three weeks. I made myself take an interest in Hebe's love affair and I looked up Ivor Tesham in a directory called
Dod's.
I was working then in the Library of British History in Gower Street and it's full of directories and dictionaries, so there were plenty of places where I could find his name, but
Dod's
was the most comprehensive. He sounded rich and the photograph that accompanied the short biography made him look very handsome, unless the
camera lied, which it sometimes does. He had one of those sardonic faces that women find attractive, very dark eyes, and black hair. Looking at his picture, I wondered if he would ever get to be prime minister one day and that face would be famous. Hebe said he was very ambitious, though as far as I could tell she knew nothing about politics and cared less.

But I was talking about May 18. The play Hebe had told Gerry she and I would be seeing was called
Life Threatening.
I never got to see it. I don't even know what it's about, and I can't remember who wrote it, except that it was some new, very young playwright and was supposed to be very sexy and crude. But the name I can never forget, and every time I hear or read that phrase—
life-threatening
comes in newspapers quite often—it resonates with me, so that I see Hebe's face and hear her voice again and think of the way she died.

She had picked that play because it's very long—it ran for about three hours—so Gerry wouldn't wonder what was going on if she didn't come in till after midnight. I asked her what the scenario was for that evening with her and Ivor that she was going to be with him so much longer than usual and she said he was fixing up a birthday treat for her, her birthday present.

“I thought the pearls were your birthday present,” I said.

She'd told me about them, said he'd already given them to her and what a clever present this was because no one (meaning Gerry) would know whether they were valuable or if they came from some high-street jeweler's.