The Birthday Present (21 page)

The room they sat in was crowded with shabby chairs, an ancient sagging sofa, and a table big enough for somewhere twice the size. But you barely noticed that. What you noticed was the religious bric-à-brac, the crucifixes and icons—Ivor called them icons—the Sacred Heart of Jesus bleeding in Mary's hands, the face distorted with agony underneath the crown of thorns, the figurine of the Virgin holding the blessed child. There was a superfluity of them and they oppressed Ivor. He hadn't noticed them so much on his previous visit and he didn't on subsequent visits, but that particular time he needed the champagne to offset them, to escape their accusation. This may in part have been due also to the presence of Dermot shuffling about the room, his lusterless eyes wandering from statuette to crucifix, until they came to rest on a framed picture of a pallid-faced woman with a veil covering her hair. He stood in front of this picture, staring, his mouth working, possibly in prayer.

“Talking to St. Rita,” Philomena said in an admiring tone. “Dermot has a real devotion to St. Rita.”

Sean cast up his eyes and, behind his mother's back, mimed the playing of a dirge on a violin. Ivor poured more champagne and got on with what he had come about. When he got home, or probably when he next went into the Commons library, he looked up St. Rita and found she was the patron saint of lost causes. She had suffered all her life from a chronic illness and was known in Spain, where she came
from, as
la abogada de imposibles,
the saint of desperate cases. It seemed appropriate.

If the true reason for the offer he was about to make was to ward off blackmail, Ivor had no intention of even hinting at that. And perhaps that wasn't the reason. It really was from friendship—and pity. He didn't mention that either. Instead he said Dermot had serviced his car over such a long period (actually it was three years and how many times do you have a car serviced in three years when you only use it at weekends?) and had been so thorough and efficient, so pleasant and so insistent on always returning the car himself, that he felt they had become friends. It must have cost him something to say that, in that place and in that company, with big rough Sean, red-faced like the drinker he wasn't, wearing a dirty white singlet and khaki shorts, his greasy yellow hair down on his shoulders, making faces behind his mother's back. But he did say it. He said he felt he had a duty to that friendship to make Dermot and his family's life easier. Therefore he hoped they'd accept an allowance of ten thousand a year.

T
here was no argument. Ivor had supposed there would be some polite demur, some disclaimer. “Oh, we couldn't possibly take it,” or “That's far too generous.” Something like that. The trouble was he didn't know his audience. He didn't know people like the Lynches, people from their social stratum, their background, their financial condition. He might be an MP and a minister but he had no idea that men and women existed whose whole life, for some of them from early childhood and certainly to the grave, was a struggle for subsistence, a struggle to get money, to live with some dignity. Not a lot of money, not even enough money, but sufficient to possess some of the things he took absolutely for granted: warmth in winter, an occasional holiday, a television set; not a new car, not that, but an old banger or a motorbike. He ought to have known. He was involved in public life, he had canvassed for election, he had talked to teenage mothers with babies in their arms, to pensioners in slippers, to the unemployed on benefit. But he had done so on doorsteps for two minutes at a time.

So he was surprised and perhaps a little piqued (though he didn't say so) that the only rejoinder he got was a nod from Sean and a “Right,” and from Philomena, “That would be a help,” though she looked, not at him, but at one of her figurines, as if a plaster saint—truly, a saint made from plaster—was responsible for this largesse. He was disappointed. Like my daughter Nadine, bestowing the first Christmas present she had ever given, he expected extravagant gratitude, repeated thanks. She was three and a half and she got it, but all he got was an apparently indifferent acceptance.

He asked Philomena for her bank details. Oh, Ivor, Ivor, did you? Did you really do that? She didn't know what he meant. She had never had a bank account. Nor had Sean. However, she had a Post Office savings account and it was into this that he arranged to pay the ten thousand each year on September 1.

“Yet you go on seeing them,” Iris said. “Is that necessary?”

“I don't want them to think I'm paying them off. It's a bit awkward, isn't it? Sean knows, you see. I've told you that. He knows I set the whole thing up. It wouldn't do to make him think I was paying him because he constituted a threat to me.”

“Well, aren't you?”

“Absolutely not, Iris. They think it's done out of friendship and they're right. As a matter of fact, Sean regards me as a friend now. His girlfriend was there when Juliet and I went round the night you saw us and Sean introduced me as his friend. ‘This is my friend Ivor,' he said.”

“Right. You're his friend. You meet him for a drink, do you? You have him in the Commons for lunch? You and Juliet and
Sean
and his girlfriend have dinner together? I don't think so.” Iris was looking at him the way I've never seen her look at him before, with an exasperation which wasn't at all amused. “I said I think you've gone mad and I do. This man's
got a criminal record. Do you know what for? You say he's some sort of laborer, but does he ever work? Or is his work petty crime?” They were near to quarreling and, though they sparred, they never quarreled. She changed tack a little. “Can you afford ten thousand a year?”

“Yes,” he said. “I promised, so I have to.”

Whether he really could at that time I don't know. Ten thousand was a lot more in 1992 than it is now. But he certainly could afford it by the spring of 1993. His and Iris's father died. John Tesham and I had never seen eye to eye on a lot of things, but I liked him in spite of our differences and I specially liked his manner with our children, his sweetness to them and his patience. He had gone out for a walk with his dogs, no doubt along those lanes, or lanes like them, where I had so much enjoyed walking and carrying my daughter, on a fine day in late April when the trees were in new leaf. The dogs came back without him and led his wife and a neighbor to a spot in the churchyard where he lay dead among the cowslips.

Ivor made a stirring speech at his funeral, praising him for all sorts of things I never knew he had, devotion to the Church of England, a love of the poetry of Thomas Hardy, and a tenderness toward animals, among others. That last surprised me, as I remembered the hecatombs of pheasants and partridges he shot every winter. Ivor called him “one of the last of the English squires” and even referred to him as the lord of the manor. There was a reading of the will afterward, something which I, though I'm an accountant, didn't know still happened. John Tesham left Ramburgh House to his wife in trust for her lifetime and a considerable income, fifty thousand to his daughter, Iris, and twice that in trust till they were twenty-one to each of his grandchildren. Everything else went to Ivor and it was such a large sum that even
I, who am used to dealing with large sums (mostly other people's), was surprised.

Ten thousand a year would be peanuts to him in the future. He was too much of the English gentleman to give a sign that this fortune which had come to him—huge even after inheritance tax—was any consolation for his loss. We had all driven up to Norfolk together and he talked most of the way back about his father's virtues and his own sorrow. It was at least a month and the third anniversary of Hebe's death was past, before he mentioned, almost in passing, that “now I can afford it” he meant to buy a house in London. The move he had earlier envisaged when he parked his car in our garage would be to another, larger flat, but now a house in Westminster was a possibility.

Juliet was still living in her flat, her half a house, in Park Road, Queen's Park. She spent her weekends at Ivor's in Old Pye Street, though as far as I know, he never spent his in Park Road. He would never have said so, but I think he would have considered it infra dig to have been seen to be staying in that part of London, he a Minister of the Crown (as Philomena Lynch repeatedly referred to him with pride), he an MP who was also becoming a television personality. He had been interviewed by David Frost and had held his own. Presenters of political panel programs sought him out. His was a recognizable face and not, in his view, permitted to be recognized by the denizens of Kensal Green borders when nipping down to Salusbury Road to pick up a taxi.

Yet there was no sign of Juliet moving in with him. His flat was on the market and one of those professional house-hunters was—well, hunting for a house for him. Such people take 3 percent of the purchase price and Ivor expected to enrich this man by forty thousand pounds.

“I haven't the time to mess about with estate agents and orders to view,” he said.

What did Juliet live on? She never worked. Today, with the cult of the celebrity at its height, some of the glamour that was beginning to attach to him would have rubbed off on her and she might have been one of those good-looking women who become famous for doing nothing. For just being and for being a well-known man's girlfriend. But society hadn't then reached that stage. Her going about with Ivor certainly wouldn't have helped her get parts in the theater—if she was even trying to get parts. She dressed very well. Gone were the patchwork skirts and the ethnic bangles. She had grown her hair long and always, when we saw her, wore it up and done in such a smooth yet intricate way as to make me, and more significantly Iris, think she must be at the hairdresser's three times a week. Ivor, we decided, must be giving her some sort of allowance, and we were old-fashioned enough, though Iris was only two years her senior, to feel there was something distasteful about a man supporting a woman who was not his wife, was not even what was just beginning to be called his partner.

But we didn't know. We couldn't ask and wouldn't. It wasn't our business and we both liked Juliet, her apparent frank openness, her obvious affection for Ivor, her charm, so necessary to a woman with her name. But our puzzlement at her behavior was still there: how could she have so readily taken up with Ivor when, however you looked at it, it was he who had caused her former boyfriend's death? Or to put it slightly more accurately, without Ivor's birthday present scenario, her ex-boyfriend—and how ex had he been?— would still be alive.

She knew all about it, every detail, from the request and offer to Lloyd and Dermot to the crash, through the kidnap,
the police and press misapprehension, Dermot's terrible injuries and, possibly though not certainly, the questioning by the police of Sean Lynch over Sandy Caxton's death.

A strange and rather unwelcome thought came to me one night, in the small hours. I had got up to see to Adam, who was crying. A bad dream had wakened him. What kind of nightmare does a happy two-year-old have that wakes him screaming, calling in desperate fear for his mother and father? He couldn't tell me, so I sat with him, his hand in mine, until he went to sleep, and when I made my way back to our bedroom I thought suddenly, she knows but she tells no one, she never will. Does he pay her to keep silent?

In the morning I talked about it with Iris. “There's a kind of blackmail,” I said, “where no threat need ever be made, where you might say the
reverse
of a threat is made, so that she says to him, ‘You know I'll never say a word.' But the knowledge is there. He knows that she knows even if she never mentions it again. So he puts her under an obligation to him by giving her—what? Twice what he's giving the Lynches? She'll never say a word because she won't want to lose this generous allowance, though nothing has ever been said between them about why he gives it to her.”

“Even more to the point,” said Iris, “nothing has ever been said about why she's happy to receive it. But can it be, Rob? He's in love with her, isn't he? She's in love with him. Can those two things exist side by side, love and—what? An unspoken threat?”

I said I didn't think they were mutually exclusive. Besides, we didn't really know, did we? Juliet might have some other source of income, something perhaps from her ex-husband, Aaron Hunter.

“I hope so,” Iris said. “I don't like to think of my brother paying out two lots of blackmail, both to people who
threaten him only in his head. What must be going on in his head if he sees these threats coming from more and more people? Because they could, they could.”

“Could they? Who, for instance?”

“Jane Atherton?”

Not just after it happened but a couple of years later, when he seemed to be on safe ground, Ivor had told us about his meeting with Jane Atherton, at her flat, when she asked him to choose a keepsake from Hebe's jewelry. He had been terrified, he said, for he had never forgotten the words he had used to her on the phone when he'd asked her what she was going to do. That was something he regretted almost daily. Leaving the Commons and taking a taxi up to her flat, he thought about her manner of inviting him, her words:
we have things to talk about.
That could mean only one thing, that she had decided what she was going to do. Climbing the stairs, he felt a tightness in his chest he thought might be the onset of a heart attack. His relief when she asked him to pick a memento was enormous, but it wasn't all-overpowering. He could still wonder if she was going to show him the pearls. She didn't and he couldn't ask.

He had never heard from her again but she still existed, no doubt. She still knew what she knew.

I
MENTIONED AARON
Hunter. Having failed to win the seat he had contested in the general election, he had gone back to the stage, where there had apparently been widespread regret at his ever leaving it. All four of us, Iris and I, Ivor and Juliet, went to see him in
Lear.
Not playing the king, of course, he was still rather too young for that, but a critic-acclaimed Edgar. I'm too squeamish for
Lear.
The putting out of Gloucester's eyes is too much for me and with every
production I see, the director, or whoever is responsible for these things, makes it more hideous, more gruesome. As the poor man's eyes are pulled out I have to shut mine and hang my head and Iris is similarly affected. The other two seemed to watch it unmoved—as far as I know, I couldn't see—but I sensed their coolness, their civilized acceptance. We went round afterward to congratulate Aaron Hunter, he and Juliet being on perfectly good terms. (I had the impression Juliet would be on good terms with everyone from her past, and come to that her present, but I may have been wrong.) Ivor had met him before and, instead of the theater, the two of them talked politics, on which they had to agree to differ, their views being diametrically opposed. We asked him to have a late supper with us but he refused. He was tired; he was performing again next day.