The Birthday Present (28 page)

T
HAT WAS THREE
days ago.

Nothing was broken but I'm badly bruised. There's a lump on my forehead where he pushed me against the door. My knees and the palms of my hands are scraped like children's are when they fall over. But the shock of it is past, the shaking and trembling are over. And I have got what I wanted, the link, the connection between the Lynches and Ivor Tesham. I need never go near Sean Lynch and Dermot and their mother again. We will never meet again. I don't think any of them would want to come near me either. They don't know who I am or where I live.

Sleep is impossible, though. Worse than it was before. I don't get Callum and the dog keeping me awake, I get a picture, still but in full color, of that man banging my head against the door. I can see the green paint of the door and the picture of the suffering Christ next to it. But when I fall asleep the action starts, the movement and sensation, the hot breath on the back of my head, the buckles and studs stabbing into my back, and feeling these things is sharper and more painful in the dream than it was in reality. I wake up crying real tears, my heart beating irregularly, sweat soaking the front of my nightdress.
Life Threatening.

Lying there in the dark, shivering from the sweat, I tell myself I am too frightened to confront Tesham. I know that if he sets Sean Lynch on me I shall cave in. I shall fall on my knees and cry and beg for mercy. And it may be worse than that. My heart may fail; I could have a heart attack. But these are the fantasies of the night, when law-abiding people become
gangsters and extravagant behavior calls for wild responses. In the morning I feel differently. We always do feel differently in the morning. Knowing that, why can't we use this knowledge to help ourselves in the dreadful dreams of night? I don't know. No one knows.

I must confront Tesham. I haven't come so far and been through so much to give up now. I used to think we only went mad at night, that we were strangers to ourselves at night, but now it's in the daytime too. Will it get better when I have money? When Tesham gives me money, will I be free?

I never used to notice dogs, but now I see them all the time. Callum didn't have a dog while he was with me. He's got one since we split up, a mastiff I think it is, and it wears a black leather collar with spikes. Someone else walks it now, takes it past this house on the way to the High Road.

Because Callum is dead, isn't he?

I
n early 1994, Ivor was kept busy at the Defence Department. There were more IRA bombs, though none actually exploded. An army helicopter was hit by an IRA mortar bomb in Crossmaglen, injuring an officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, though its pilot man aged to land without injury to the crew.

Ivor's party was doing badly. In local elections held in early May Conservative representation in contested seats fell by 429 to 888 and the Tory majority was lost in eighteen of the thirty-three councils where it had had control before. On May 12 John Smith, leader of the Labour Party, dropped dead of a heart attack. This was a terrible blow, but when the party rallied Tony Blair began to be regarded as a contender for the leadership.

Whether Ivor noticed that May 18 was the fourth anniversary of Hebe's death I have no idea. We went to dinner with him and Juliet in Glanvill Street a day or two later, when the other guests were Jack Munro and his wife and Erica Caxton with the new husband she had married in
February. The talk was all of Ivor and Juliet's forthcoming engagement.

E
NGAGEMENTS ARE NOT
what they used to be, essential precursors to marriage. In some ways they have become like the civil partnerships for heterosexual couples we didn't have then and still don't have now but are talked about a lot. The girl wears a ring that might as well be a wedding ring except that it usually has a diamond in it; the couple refer to each other as “my fiancé(e)” instead of “my husband” and “my wife.” They have no tax concessions but otherwise they might as well be married. The chances are, of course, that they never will be.

Ivor and Juliet got engaged at the end of May. The occasion was another excuse for a party in Glanvill Street but this time we didn't go, for the simple reason that we couldn't find a babysitter. It's harder when you've three children, especially when one of them is only months old. My mother was in Mallorca, Iris's mother herself at the party. We had to be content with the pictures a tabloid used, one of celebrity guests arriving and another of Juliet holding Ivor's arm and showing off her diamond and sapphire trophy. I wondered if all those photographs would spark off another visit from Beryl Palmer, but if it did Ivor said nothing about it.

If he heard nothing from her, a disquieting piece of news came to him from Sean Lynch. Ivor had more or less discontinued his visits to the Lynches, but he apparently made up for this by inviting Sean to any functions he could attend and yet be lost in the crowd. When I pointed this out to him he denied it angrily. His attitude to Sean was no different, he insisted, from that he had for any of his friends, for Jack, for instance, or Erica Caxton or the Trenants. I could have
commented that he met all these people in t^te-à-t^te situations with Juliet, but I didn't. He wanted to tell me what Sean had to say about a visitor to the Lynches' flat.

Ivor's engagement party wasn't the ideal occasion for imparting unwelcome news but I suppose Sean had no choice. He took Ivor aside and told him he had come home and found a woman there questioning Dermot and his mother about the crash in which Dermot was injured. She said she was from Westminster Council but Sean didn't believe this. Ivor asked him her name and, when he said he didn't know, to describe her.

“A dog,” Sean said in his brutal way. “Short, skinny, frizzy hair.”

Ivor said he felt Sean was keeping something back. He was genuinely angry, Ivor could tell that, but disclosing only as much as he thought Ivor needed to know. He almost confirmed this by saying, “You don't want to worry, Ivor. You've got enough on your plate without that. I can handle her, the cow. I just reckoned it wouldn't be right to keep it from you.”

Sean's description wasn't conclusive. Ivor had to ask. “You don't know who she was?”

“Not a social worker from the council. Let's leave it there, shall we?”

“It was Jane Atherton,” Ivor said to me. “Sean wouldn't say but I'm sure.”

He was made nervous. Perhaps the good time, the quiet months, years really, were past. Things were starting to happen, small things, of little importance, but they added up. Maybe the next one wouldn't be so small. But time went by and he heard nothing more from Sean and nothing from Jane Atherton or Beryl Palmer. He began to think that freak storm was dying down. But something much bigger was looming.

The function to which he and Juliet had been invited was in Carlton Gardens, a fund-raising reception for the Marfan Syndrome Society. Ivor knew very little about Marfan and wasn't particularly interested in it, but Juliet was. Her father, now dead, had suffered from it and so did her brother. Once she was in her teens and it was clear that she didn't have it, she had learned it was genetic and could be inherited. Marfan, apparently, is one of those hereditary conditions which, if you have it, you have a fifty-fifty chance of passing it on to your children, hence the brother showing its symptoms. Juliet knew by then that, since she didn't have it, it had so to speak died with her and she could never pass it on. As Iris and I had noticed, she wanted children and was anxious too, of course, that when they came (if they ever came, if Ivor would permit it) they should be healthy. She retained her interest and with it a hope of helping sufferers, so she accepted the invitation and they both went to the reception.

Through the years that had passed since Hebe's death, Ivor told me he had carefully avoided being present at anything connected with the Heart and Lung Trust, of which Gerry Furnal had been chief fund-raiser. He avoided all charity functions unless going to them was politically expedient except for those taking place in his constituency and these he attended for that reason. How much of this came from a fear of encountering Gerry Furnal I don't know but certainly Furnal was unlikely to be promoting the interests of HALT in Morningford. It's possible that Ivor would have put aside caution and gone to a HALT reception if it had taken place there, but it's more probable he would have pleaded government business kept him away.

It seems that he'd assumed Hebe's husband was still in the job he had at the time of her death, though he could easily
have found out whether he was or not. Perhaps he thought that the process of finding out, even if done in privacy, would make him look cowardly to himself. And how he looked to himself was very important to him. He and Juliet arrived about half an hour after the Marfan party started, Ivor hoping not to have to stay long as they had a dinner engagement. There were rather too many people for the size of the room and moving about was difficult. Someone he didn't know mounted the podium, introduced himself as the chairman of the association, and announced their principal speaker. It was Gerry Furnal.

Ivor had noticed Furnal bustling around, fiddling with the micro phone and shifting it about on the podium, but hadn't recognized him. Of course he had seen him before. He must have seen him at that HALT gathering in the Jubilee Room when he first met Hebe, but he had hardly noticed him. In Carlton Gardens, if he hadn't been introduced by what he called “some other do-gooding luminary,” Ivor wouldn't have known him. When the man's name was announced, he whispered to Juliet, “You know who that is?”

She didn't. I think she'd forgotten Hebe's surname. She shook her head.

“Hebe's husband,” he said.

“Oh dear, does it embarrass you?”

Ivor doesn't care for it to be thought by anyone that he could be embarrassed. English gentlemen aren't. It implies a weakness, I suppose, just as being asked if you're shy does or if you dislike speaking in public. He wanted people to believe him far too sophisticated to be embarrassed, while at the same time disapproving of the word “sophisticated” as applied to himself or to anyone else, approving of it only as a qualifier of concepts. So, “Not at all,” he told Juliet, “but I shall avoid him as I dare say he'll avoid me.”

Gerry Furnal spoke quite eloquently (Ivor said) on the subjects of research into the treatment of Marfan and of possible future gene therapy. He named sums in millions that were needed to further these advances and spoke of an appeal that the society was shortly to launch. There was applause, amid which he stepped down and was immediately surrounded. As Ivor had told Juliet he would, he set about avoiding him. This wasn't a difficult task as for the first ten minutes after making his speech, large numbers of people wanted to speak to Furnal and hemmed him in. Ivor and Juliet circulated, losing sight of each other after a while, taking glasses of wine from proffered trays. Juliet stopped in her progress to talk to the society's president, whom she knew.

Ivor was temporarily alone, making his way toward a Tory peer he had spotted on the far side of the room, the only person he felt like talking to, when Gerry Furnal came up to him. Ivor said he wasn't fazed. He was probably the most important guest there and it was only to be expected that MSS's chief fund-raising officer would wish to speak to him. Smiling, he held out his hand.

Furnal didn't take it. Ivor said he was absolutely cool and quiet, for which (being the sort of man he was) he rather admired him.

“There was no exchange of pleasantries,” Ivor told us, “none of that how-are-you-good-of-you-to-come stuff. Well, there wouldn't be in the circumstances. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a pearl necklace. It wasn't in a case or anything, it wasn't even in a bag. I didn't recognize it. The fact is I'd forgotten all about the bloody thing. He said, ‘I believe you gave this to my late wife. Perhaps you'll take it back, as I have no use for it.'

“My God, Ivor,” Iris said. “It must have been a hell of a shock. Did you blush?”

“Don't be silly. I don't blush. I said I didn't want it, he'd much better keep it, and he said very pompously something about its being dirty and he no longer wished to be soiled by it. A lot of people had gone by then, so there was a bit more space, and a couple of women were staring. I didn't have a choice really. I put the pearls in my pocket and walked off, found Juliet and we went.”

I asked him if that was all Furnal had said.

“That was all.”

“How did he know?” Iris asked. “How did he know it was you who gave her the pearls?”

“I couldn't exactly ask, could I? I'm sure Hebe never told him. It's possible he remembered seeing me speak to Hebe when I first met her in the Jubilee Room. I wouldn't think that was enough. I mean, that's putting two and two together and making about fifty-seven, isn't it?”

I asked him when this MSS reception was and he said two days before. “Has anything happened since?”

“If you mean have I heard from him, no, there's been nothing. I doubt if anything will happen. He's had his moment of triumph and he'll probably dine out on it for the rest of his life. If he dines out, that is.”

“I don't think he'll dine out on it,” Iris said quietly.

“Yes, well, please don't tell me I've ruined his life or anything like that. Men get cuckolded, end of story.”

He had brought the pearls with him in a Boots plastic bag. “God knows what he's done with the case,” he said, and he tipped them out onto the table. Nadine and Adam had joined us by this time and my little girl was, of course, entranced by what she called “the big beads.” To Ivor's amusement, she picked them up and ran them through her fingers. “I offered them to Juliet, but she said, ‘I don't do pearls.' I said she was wearing pearls in her ears when I first met her
but to no avail. She was a bit cross.” He put his head on one side and a hand on Nadine's shoulder. “You can have them, sweetheart—would you like to?”

Iris was furious. She snatched the pearls out of Nadine's hand, stuffed them back into the bag and shouted at Ivor, “No, she can't. Never dare say that again! She doesn't want your ladyfriend's leftovers and nor do I.”