The Birthday Present (8 page)

Not with his number or his name, not with “Hello” but a simple cool, “Yes?”

I took a deep breath. “Mr. Tesham,” I said, “my name is Jane Atherton. Hebe was my friend. I have been with her husband all day and now I'm at home I thought you might want to talk to me. I mean, I know you arranged for Hebe to be picked up last night. I thought there might be things you wanted to know.”

Silence. It endured so long that I thought for one moment that she might have made it up. She was a fantasist. Maybe she had some other lover, some
ordinary
man, but to make me envious had told me it was this glamorous MP. The pearls were fake, she'd bought them herself at some cheap place.

“Mr. Tesham?”

At last he spoke. “I think you must have been her alibi.”

“Yes.”

“A rare occurrence for me, but I am at a loss for words.”

“I don't mean to upset you,” I said, remembering what Mrs. Furnal had advised about compassion. It doesn't come naturally to me.

He laughed. It was a laugh without amusement. “What are you going to do?”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“Really? Let me be more explicit. Do you have information you want to pass on to the—er, the authorities? Mr. Furnal? Perhaps you'd be good enough to tell me.”

I didn't know what he meant. Did he think I was threatening him? My excitement died and the tears I couldn't shed when Gerry was crying pricked my eyelids now. A cold drop ran down my cheek. I could cry for myself.

“I'm not going to tell anyone,” I said. “I don't know anything to tell anyone. All I know is that you sent a car that was meant to pick Hebe up last night.”

“Ah,” he said. “I think you've confused things, Miss Atherton.
A
car picked Hebe up last night, but it had nothing to do
with me. The two men inside it intended to abduct her. Does that clear things up for you?”

It was he who confused me. He made me feel the way good-looking sophisticated men always do, even when I can only hear them. I said, “Yes, thank you,” and to that I added, “I'm sorry.”

I really cried then. Great tearing sobs. I'd made a fool of myself. On a high all day, I had dropped down into the depths in the space of the three minutes the call lasted. Why I should have remembered at this point how Hebe had humiliated me, I don't know. Unless it was because he had done the same. Back into my mind came her kindly suggestions that such and such a boring man, some colleague of Gerry's, their next-door neighbor who lived with his mother, the elderly widower who was my boss at the library, might be persuaded to fancy me. That was what led to me inventing Callum. I started wondering if she had liked going about with me because seeing us together pointed up her beauty by contrast to me. So I cried and drank some more wine and went to bed, only to get up again when the phone rang.

Mummy, of course. Was it my friend all that stuff on the news was about? The girl who lived in that rather squalid house in the middle of nowhere?

“That's a bit rich from someone who lives in Ongar,” I said.

“Please don't start by being rude to me, Jane. I've been ringing and ringing you all day. The least you can do is tell me if this thing on the television is true.”

So I told her what my day had been like, with special reference to how upset I was at losing my best friend.

“Well, really, Jane, I would have thought I was your best friend. I'm sure no one does more for you than I do.”

That I ignored and went on a bit about Gerry being devastated, a word she uses a lot herself, and poor little Justin. I'd
done the shopping for them, I said, and cooked and now I was exhausted, so if she wouldn't mind I'd ring off. The phone rang again almost immediately and of course I thought it was her, wanting to reprove me for being offhand. It wasn't, it was Gerry.

The police had been and had told him they had reason to believe that Hebe had been abducted by mistake for someone else, a far more likely victim, the wife of a multimillionaire. That was why the press had gone. This news would be in the newspapers next day and on the television.

If I could spare the time, would I come up to Irving Road again tomorrow? I hesitated and then I said of course I would. There wouldn't be the excitement there had been today. The media people would now be outside the multimillionaire's place, wherever that was.

I said I had come down from my high and dropped into the depths, but now I sank even lower. I suppose that unconsciously I'd been thinking, certainly hoping, that Ivor Tesham might have been in some way responsible, but now I knew he couldn't be. It was a real kidnap and the woman they meant to abduct was someone else, someone who maybe looked like Hebe but that was all.

Why had I said I'd go up to Irving Road again? What was in it for me? The fact was I had nothing else to do and that is true for me on most Sundays. As I lay down in bed again I had another premonition, a very powerful one this time. “Premonition” means something bad to come, though, doesn't it? This wouldn't be bad but maybe a real future for me. Like I often do, I saw it in pictures—one single picture really. I was in the house in Irving Road, in the living room, and Gerry was there sitting in the other armchair. All the photographs he keeps of Hebe about the place had gone and I had a wedding ring on my finger.

I
vor was relieved in an entirely unreasonable way. It was as if the crash and the abduction had nothing to do with him but were only something which he, like almost every newspaper reader in the country, had read about. Press attention had shifted to Kelly Mason, to her husband and his millions, to his purchase of a football team; police attention had shifted away from Irving Road, West Hendon, to the Bishops Avenue, Hampstead Garden Suburb. He knew this theory must be false, he knew what had really happened, but it seemed to him only like a heaven-sent reprieve that carried with it a free pardon.

“I'm off the hook.” He punched the air exultantly. “The worst is over.”

“Hebe is still dead,” Iris said.

“I'm well aware of that, thank you.”

“What exactly were you afraid of, Ivor?”

“ ‘Afraid' is a strong word,” he said. “I was starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable about the possibility of my little adventure coming to light. In some gossip column, for instance.”
He gets pompous and talks like a politician when he is excited. “In some diary piece. If I'd gone to the police, as you helpfully suggested, that's what would have happened. Now, you see, anything like that would have been quite unnecessary. It wasn't Hebe they meant to abduct. It was this Kelly Mason.”

He placed the scathing stress on “Kelly” that up-and-coming Tory notables always do put on names they perceive as working class. Iris looked at him sadly. She was more affected by all this than I was, but then she loved him a whole lot more than I did. She shook her head.

“But you know that isn't true. They did abduct Hebe. It may have been a mock abduction but it was aimed at Hebe, not Kelly Mason. Don't you have to get that clear, whatever the police and the media may think?”

Ivor had turned up without warning halfway through Sunday morning, his arms full of Sunday papers. Our reception of the news hadn't been the wholehearted congratulations on his escape he had expected.

“Whatever,” he said dismissively “Have you seen a paper yet? Have you seen the news on television? It's extraordinary. This chap Damian Mason has been getting anonymous letters threatening to kill his wife if he doesn't give up buying whatever-it-is United football team. He even had one threatening to abduct her. I imagine he told the police it wasn't Hebe but his wife poor old Dermot and Lloyd were after. I feel like going up there and shaking his hand.”

“I wouldn't,” said Iris.

“Of course I won't.”

I had picked up the
Sunday Times
and was looking at the photo graph of Kelly Mason, a pretty blonde not all that unlike Hebe.

“You can see the resemblance,” I said.

“To Hebe? Oh, please. You jest.” He had an irritating habit of saying this, like some minor character in Shakespeare, instead of “you must be joking.” I don't think I'd ever disliked my brother-in -law so much, though I knew my antipathy wouldn't last. “Hebe was beautiful,” he said. “She had a delicate, ethereal sort of beauty. Actually, I can't bear to think of that damaged, spoilt. That really distresses me.”

It was at this point that Nadine, who had been asleep upstairs, let out a disgruntled cry. I went up to her, glad of the chance to get away. When I came back with her in my arms, Iris was asking what Kelly Mason would have been doing walking down the Watford Way at seven in the evening or any other time. Wouldn't she more likely have been in her Lamborghini in Hampstead Garden Suburb?

“It's actually a Porsche she has,” Ivor said, laughing. He could laugh. His bouncing from frightened gloom into adrenaline-fueled ebullience was almost manic. “Apparently, her mother lives in one of those roads off the Watford Way. She'd been there on Friday—in the Porsche of course— and was safe at home when they thought they were abducting her.”

Iris corrected him. “When the police
think
they thought they were abducting her, you mean.”

“You know, if I wasn't convinced of your sisterly devotion, I'd begin to think you rather resented my escape from disgrace. That's what the press call people in my position who've come to grief, you know, ‘the disgraced MP.' Is that what you'd like?”

I'd had enough of this, so I took Nadine into the kitchen, where I laid her down on a counter and performed that task which, in the eyes of women's magazine journalists and nannies, is supposed to be the test of good fatherhood: I changed her nappy. She kicked and smiled and laughed, and
as always I was lost in adoration. She is almost eighteen now, gratifying me with her splendid A-level results, four passes at A grade, and it says something for her good sense that if she heard this, my talking about her as a baby would provoke no more from her than an amused, “Oh, Dad.”

Though richer and neither more nor less beautiful, Kelly Mason hasn't enjoyed such good fortune, such love or happy family life. She knew nothing beforehand about the anonymous letters—her husband had kept them from her—but she knew when she read those Sunday papers. They called her a “Checkout Chick” and a “Supermarket Cinderella” because she worked for Tesco when Damian Mason first saw her. He was in there buying a packet of crisps and two hundred cigarettes. It was his first ever visit to a supermarket and probably his last and he fell in love with her. Everyone said she was lucky. He took her to some South Pacific island on their honeymoon and bought her a big house (the papers called it a mansion) in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

She had always been nervous, a shy diffident sort of girl. The journalists who interviewed her after the attempted abduction mocked her cruelly for having no O levels (GCSEs were called O levels when she was at school), for wearing high heels with white jeans, for enjoying television sitcoms. The photographs they used of her were the ones in which she was standing awkwardly, her mouth open or her eyes shut. The press that assembled outside her house terrified her. She was afraid even to go near a window. After four days of it she had a miscarriage.

Kelly Mason passionately wanted children. She never had any. She had several what were then called mental breakdowns instead. Psychiatric wards in private hospitals became places with which she grew very familiar. She spent six months in one of them and long periods in others. Most of
this found its way into the papers as Damian Mason's riches increased and his fortune passed the five hundred million mark. You can probably remember all this. When it seemed unlikely that Kelly would ever emerge from her incarceration in some expensive hydro for the incurably insane, Mason divorced her. He married again last year and his new wife has just had a baby. I'd be the first to say that all this wasn't Ivor's fault, but without his idea of a birthday present for Hebe Furnal it would very likely never have happened.

I went back into the living room and found them both still sitting where they had been before but Iris drinking a glass of water and Ivor with his usual gin and tonic. That reminded me.

“Thanks for the champagne,” I said.

He laughed. “You thought I'd put it in your fridge to thank you for lending me your house. No doubt I should have done, but I didn't. I forgot it. Still, you're welcome.”

I put Nadine on a blanket on the floor and we watched her kick and roll about and laugh.

“Isn't she lovely?” Iris said.

“Very lovely.” I think he meant it. “I'm proud to be her uncle.”

“Would it do you any real harm if all this got into the papers? It wasn't your fault. If it was anyone's, it looks as if it was Dermot Lynch's.”

I don't know if it was her mention of the press or Dermot Lynch's name, but a shadow seemed to cross his face. The young, carefree look he'd had from the moment he came into the house an hour before had gone.

“It depends on what you mean by real harm. The Lady”— Ivor always referred to Margaret Thatcher as “the Lady”— “wouldn't like it. If I'm in line for promotion I wouldn't get it or not yet. If they used stuff about the handcuffs and the
gag they'd make me look like some sort of pervert.” He tried to sound confident but didn't quite succeed. “You see, there'd be the little difficulty of me not going to the police when the media made it look like a real abduction and perhaps rather a larger difficulty when I didn't after they thought this Kelly Mason was the victim. But I really think that's all over now. I mean, with the interest moving to the Masons—even if Dermot comes round and talks, a pretty unlikely eventuality, would anyone believe him?”

I'd decided not to join in this conversation.

Iris said, “They'd want to see you, though, wouldn't they? They'd ask you if there was any connection between you and the Masons and maybe between you and Hebe.”

He had thought of that, but being reminded of it brought that sullen look back to his face. “Well, perhaps, but no one knows about me and Hebe except you.”

“Are you sure of that?”

One person knew or half knew, the woman friend of Hebe's who had provided her alibi. She had phoned him the night before but he didn't tell us that then. He wanted to get off the subject, that was clear. He had said he was off the hook and now it was starting to look as if he was still hung up on it. Ivor's is one of those natures that will put the best construction on a situation if possible, take the brightest view, be optimistic. It's a useful trait in a politician. After all, they never get up in Parliament and say the war was a mistake, the economy is in dire straits, and only darkness lies ahead, do they? Ivor sat up straight in his chair, asked for another gin, and said he had a feeling everything was going to be all right. It would blow over.