The Birthday Present (25 page)

I wonder what has happened to Dermot Lynch of
Paddington, west London. He was very seriously injured. Perhaps he died. I find the west London phone book, the residential section. Paddington is W2. There are a great many Lynches, a lot of them with the initial D., but none in W2. In fact, among all the Lynches, only one is in W2 and that is a P. H. Lynch at 23 William Cross Court, Rowley Place. P. H. could be his wife or his father or brother.

I would like to know if Dermot Lynch is still alive.

I
didn't get the job with the breeze-block manufacturers. On my way back from Craven Park the car broke down. I was stuck in the Harrow Road, unable to get the car to start and very much aware, once again, that this was only going to be a problem because it was going to cost me. For one thing, I had let my membership of the RAC lapse and for another I had given up using my mobile phone. I'd only had it to use in the car and practically the only time I needed it … Well, I had to leave the car where it was and walk to a garage half a mile away that a local shopkeeper said might help me. They did. They agreed to tow the car, look it over and assess what needed doing, but when I got back to it in their truck, I had got a parking ticket.

Getting home by public transport would have taken hours. The only bus available was a number 18, which went nowhere near where I wanted to be. I got a taxi, though I couldn't afford it. The driver took me along the Harrow Road into Warwick Avenue and, because the road ahead was
up, turned into Rowley Place. And there, on the right-hand side, a little way along, was William Cross Court. Was this a piece of luck? If it was, it was the first I'd had for years. Luck doesn't come my way, so I suspect it when it does. I can't help wondering if maybe it isn't luck at all or if it has a sting in the tail.

What was the use of it, after all? I already knew a Lynch lived in William Cross Court if he lived anywhere. I could have found the place for myself without the intervention of an expensive taxi and a taxi driver. He turned into a road called Park Place Villas and up Maida Avenue to the Edgware Road. Of course he was going the longest and therefore most expensive way possible.

M
Y CAR IS
going to cost eight hundred pounds to put right, new crankshaft, new fan, four new tires, a lot of new parts for the engine and, of course, a new battery. And even then, the man says, it won't be as good as new. Frankly, he says, it should go to the scrap heap. I've started asking myself if I need a car, if it wouldn't be better to leave it where it is and ask Mr. Know-all to dispose of it.

By bus and on foot I have called at six employment agencies and while I wait for something to come from them— from
one
of them—I scan the Situations Vacant in the newspapers. I stare at most of them in bewilderment. I don't know what they are. What is a people coordinator? What's a regeneration officer, an economic policy manager, a democratic services team leader? It's no good applying for them if I don't even know what the job description means.

I have to be more positive. I have to think of my advantages, such as they are: my good English degree, my library
experience, my two and a half years as a child's nanny. Surely that ought to help me get something in the health sector or, preferably, something in the health books sector, if there is such a thing. I start writing an application to a London authority—I can't go to Lancashire or Glasgow—for a job as a child care and family support officer, when the typewriter ribbon comes unraveled. It's worn out anyway. When Hebe saw it she said I must be the last person in London still using a typewriter and didn't believe me when I said I couldn't afford a computer. I suppose I can get a new ribbon tomorrow—if you can still buy them.

I wouldn't have got the job anyway, I expect they want a social worker. The other letters I write by hand, one for a reviewing officer to a campaign called Child Alert and the other for a junior health economist, a post that trains you “to allow career progression toward a health economist position.” I won't get it. I know that. I won't be junior enough.

Mummy phones. She hasn't heard from me for two weeks, she says. Is something wrong?

“I don't know what put it into my head, Jane, but I got the idea you and Callum had parted. He hasn't left you, has he?”

Not “you haven't left him,” I noted. I tell her Callum is dead. He died in a car crash when his car collided with a forty-ton lorry on the M1. I don't know why I do that, unless I was thinking of the crash in which Hebe died. It just comes into my head to put an end to him. Kill him, the way writers kill off characters they have invented.

She gives a gasp and a little scream. There is no doubt she believes me. “You poor darling,” she says. “I'm so terribly sorry. Tell me what happened.”

I say I would rather not talk about it. I tell her about the car and the typewriter. You have to have a car, she says. How
are you going to get here without a car? That kind of selfishness almost makes me smile, it's so transparent. Never mind my needs, my feelings. All that matters is that I should be able to come to her. Sometimes she reminds me of Hebe and Justin, just as they reminded me of her.

“Oh, I can walk half a mile to Kilburn Park station,” I say, “take the Bakerloo Line to Oxford Circus, half an hour
at least
for a Central Line train going to Epping, and then spend a fortune on a taxi to Ongar. Easy, no problem.”

“There's no need to be sarcastic,” she says.

I say that there is, there is need, sarcasm is my last resort, and she says she will pay for the repairs to the car. Meanwhile she will pay for me to rent a car. I ask her why she's doing all this. Has she turned over a new leaf? That makes her start crying. She has done her best for me always, she says between sobs, and now all she is asking is that I should let her pay for a rented car that will bring me to her. I'm tempted to put the receiver down but I don't. I realize something. I realize that she is all I've got, she is all I have got left. She's my only friend. I've no job, no money, no prospects. I soon won't have a home. Callum doesn't exist and never did, and my only friend is my mother. Of course I will let her pay for the repairs and the rental of a car. I've no choice.

“I'm sorry, Mummy,” I say, my teeth gritted, and then I spin a long story about my last meeting with Callum, how dreadful it was getting the news of his death and how I feel I shall never recover from it. This was quite enjoyable and made me think I must do something like it more often. I could live in that fantasy world and invent a whole new personality and lifestyle and experience for myself, escape from the real dreary me. I could become a different person. I
agree to go down and see Mummy at the weekend—not that weekends have any significance for me—and I shall stay a few days. Her voice sounds full of tears. Well, too bad.

I
WENT TO
Ongar and stayed longer than I meant to, but it was quite pleasant to have someone to look after me for a change, instead of me looking after them, and while I was there I did my best to put my worries out of my mind. Mummy said she'd pay my mortgage for me until I got a job, that is she'd pay it for six months. I'd surely find something in that time. It all goes to show she must have far more money than she lets on.

She kept talking about Callum, saying I must be in mourning for him. We had been together so long he was practically my husband. She likes going on in this way and I am sure she tells her friends about it. They are mostly widows, and now as a sort of semi-widow I am of their company. When I start thinking Callum really existed, I shall know I am going mad. Mummy used to say, and probably still does say, that one of the things that distinguishes the mad from the sane is that mad people don't know they are insane. But I read somewhere lately that schizophrenics have flashes of insight into their condition as it is taking a hold on them. I wonder if that is what is happening to me. I wonder why seeing the madness of inventing Callum and then killing him didn't stop me doing it, why I didn't say to Mummy that it was all nonsense. The answer must be because I am no longer quite sane and if things go on being bad for me I shall sink further into madness.

•   •   •

T
HAT WAS GLOOMY
enough, even by my standards. Back here, three letters were waiting for me, two turning me down for the people coordinator and team leader jobs, no surprise there, and one from, of all people, Pandora Furnal, as I suppose I must now call her. As
she
calls herself. It was only two days old.

I expected more abuse but there wasn't any and nothing about wanting her deposit back. But that, I was sure, was because she was holding her fire. She wanted something, but she took the whole side of the page and half the other side before she got there. I may as well set down her letter in full.

As if I'm likely to know a dozen Pandoras. So she is pregnant. She didn't waste any time. A four-bedroomed house, indeed. He must be doing well. (These were some of my thoughts at the time. I soon left them behind to concentrate on what she was sending me and what she was asking.) “Run past” me, indeed; “liaise.”

The cutting she enclosed was the picture of Ivor Tesham still in its plastic folder I had found in that drawer in Hebe's bedroom that I must have left somewhere in the house. As a matter of fact, I'd forgotten all about it. No wonder after the way they had treated me. I had a closer look at it than I ever had before. He was standing by a microphone, punching the air. A newspaper had used it when he was standing for Morningford in the by-election of 1988. I had never even turned it over but I did now and there along the top margin, not in my handwriting but in Hebe's, were the words,
Must ask him for a real photo next time.

My instinct was not to answer the letter or else write and tell her what I thought of her. The new typewriter ribbon works all right, though I don't suppose it'll be long before the machine lets me down again. But to reply or not to reply? I was curious. I wanted to know what she could “run past” me. Something to do with Hebe's writing on the back of that picture? But she thought it was
my
writing. If Gerry
had seen it and seen the writing, he would know whose writing it was. If he had, it was clear he hadn't told her and clear too that he didn't know about this letter. No, she thought the writing was mine and the picture had belonged to me. She had said it was nothing personal and nothing to do with their throwing me out. Should I phone? I couldn't. She gave no phone number and they wouldn't yet be in the book. I wrote instead, fixing a date and asking her to tea. The day I chose was May 14, just before the fourth anniversary of Hebe's death. It had to be tea and not a drink; it had to be when Gerry and Justin weren't home. I sensed Gerry knew nothing about this meeting and I was right.

She had three months to go but she was huge. I think women should wear loose clothes when they're pregnant, but Pandora's blouse or tunic or whatever it's called fitted tightly over that great mound. You could see her navel protruding. I provided tea and biscuits. She ate them voraciously.

“I'm always hungry,” she said. “I'm eating for two.”

I smiled politely.

“I hope I haven't made you take a day off work,” she said. “I thought you might have insisted on the weekend and that would have been a bit awkward.”

I know myself. I'm not proud. “I have no work,” I said. “I don't have a job. I haven't had one since your husband got rid of me. If it wasn't for my mother helping me I'd be homeless.”

“Oh dear,” she said, embarrassed. “I'm sure you'll get a job soon. You're so clever.”

I let the silence prolong itself. Then I said, “What did you want to see me about?”

“Well,” she said, relaxing a bit, “it's rather strange. When we were moving I went around the house, checking on what
stuff we'd keep and stuff we'd throw out, and—well, in our bedroom I found something rather weird.”

Something I'd missed, I thought. It wasn't only Tesham's picture I'd left behind. A sequined mask, maybe, or a black lace corset. But no.

“There was a string of pearls in a box. I'd seen them before when I was tidying the place up but I hadn't taken much notice of them. I took notice of them this time. Gerry had told me they were there, but he'd said they were Hebe's and they came from Woolworths or Marks or somewhere, she'd bought them herself. But, Jane, she can't have. They can't have come from a chain store. They're enormously valuable.”

I nearly laughed. But I didn't. I asked her how she would know.

“I used to work for a company that marketed pearls.”

“I thought you were in PR,” I said.

“I was. I was with this pearl firm awhile ago, when I was in my early twenties. I was never a grader, never any sort of expert, but I
do
know. I know a string that comes from Marks from one from Bond Street. These pearls are large and perfect. Most people don't know it, but large pearls are worth more than small ones. It could be worth six or seven thousand pounds. Don't you think it's odd?”