The Birthday Present (34 page)

“I can't go in there, Rob,” Juliet said in an unnaturally high voice.

I turned down the next street on the left, came out onto Millbank and found a place to park on the Embankment. She would have to come back with me, I said, and we'd better get hold of Ivor too. Would he be there for the evening vote? She said she was sure he would be. In the bar, probably. Her gentle, loving tone took away any sting there might have been.

“It must have been like this for Gerry Furnal,” she said, “before they thought it was Kelly Mason that Lloyd and Der-mot were after. I mean, the media outside like that, persecuting him.”

She had a mobile phone with her and from the car she called the Commons and left a message for Ivor to phone her urgently. He phoned and he turned up at our house at
about eight, having taken a taxi all the way. The children, especially Nadine, enjoy having people to stay and were all over Juliet. Much as I love my daughter and my sons, I know this kind of attention can be irritating when you're anxious about something quite other, but Juliet was perfect. She behaved with them as if there was nothing she would like better than conversing with them to the exclusion of everyone else until bedtime came. Nadine insisted on taking her upstairs to see the bedroom where she and Ivor would sleep, instructing her in things she undoubtedly already knew, like how to turn on the bed lamps and which tap the hot water came out of.

Ivor and I went into the study, taking our drinks and the bottle with us. It's not really a study, at least in the sense that Iris and I do any studying in it or any work at all, but it's a quiet haven with appropriate leather armchairs and a desk of sorts, and the children aren't allowed beyond the doorway.

“No one's said a word to me in the House.”

“It's been more about Juliet than you,” I said. “It's been more about Hebe.”

“So far. My biography will start tomorrow. We'll have to go home; there's no escape. We'll just brave those people and that's all there is to it.”

“Just out of interest, why did you get to know the Lynches? You've never really told me.”

“Dermot—he was on my conscience. As soon as I knew he was going to survive. You didn't think I'd got a conscience, did you, Rob?”

That's not the sort of question I ever answer. “Now tell me why
really?”

He laughed. It wasn't much of a laugh, more a dry sort of barking sound. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he smiled. “I wanted to know what sort of a
state he was in, whether he could ever tell the police that I was the ‘mastermind' they were looking for. By the time I knew he couldn't I'd met Sean and his old mum, I was going to give them money and it was too fucking late.”

“There was a bit of conscience in it, then,” I said.

At that point he said something which may have been original, though it sounded like a quote: “When a politician becomes ‘the story' he's no longer any use in politics.”

I
VOR ORDERED
a taxi and the two of them went back to Glanvill Street at six in the morning. The press weren't there but they had turned up by seven. They mobbed Ivor when at last he came out and made Juliet cry when she appeared at a window. She thought they were going to break the window, but they didn't; they took photographs of her through the glass.

Our morning paper came after Ivor and Juliet had gone. Not Gerry Furnal but Philomena Lynch and Sheila Atherton had both given interviews. Neither mentioned the kidnap attempt. The art less Mrs. Lynch, poor woman, mother of a probable criminal and murderer and of a disabled wreck of a man, all of which the paper exploited, said how Mr. Tesham had been a friend of her son Dermot. When Mr. Tesham heard that Dermot was “a cripple” he'd come to see them with his fianceé, Miss Case, and offered Dermot a pension, which he'd been paying ever since. He was such a generous man and very good and kind, with no side to him. As for Miss Case, she was a lovely girl.

Sheila Atherton said that her daughter, the murdered girl, had worked as a children's nanny to Mr. Gerald Furnal because he had lost his wife and needed someone to look after his small son, Justin. His wife, Hebe, had been a “very close
friend” of Jane's. They had been at university together. She had died in a car crash. Yes, she thought it was the car crash that took place somewhere in London on May 18, 1990, and she thought the driver was killed. But it may have been the other man who was in the car. “A colored man,” she called Lloyd, and I was surprised the newspaper printed those words.

If you scrutinized this as Iris and I did, you could see that the link between Ivor and all this was that he had taken up with Juliet Case after her ex-boyfriend Lloyd Freeman was dead and that he had paid an allowance (a sort of disability pension) to the driver of a crash car in which Lloyd Freeman had been a passenger. Did the media even know what they were looking for?

They kept it up through the Wednesday, mostly with repetition and a plethora of photographs. Ivor went into the department by day and into the House of Commons to vote. In the past he'd always walked to work and back, but that had become impossible. Thanks to the photographs, people recognized him; cameramen followed him, anxious for more shots to use next day, leaving enough of their number behind to catch Juliet if she dared emerge. Braving them was a frightening thing, because they crowded Juliet, thrusting their cameras into her face. Her being so beautiful and eminently photogenic didn't help. I suppose she hadn't been much of an actress or hadn't had the right agent, because surely if she had she would have somehow found her way to Hollywood. Perhaps she was just so nice and, oddly, so modest. Every photograph of her which appeared made her look perfect. There was no awkwardness in any of them, no lines of strain or
moue
of anger. In a single one she seemed distressed and had tears on her face and in that she looked only like the Tragic Muse.

But why did they persist? Why did they keep the story going? Nothing new came out and two days went by. Iris said she thought that perhaps they were working on someone, persuading someone to say more, to confirm what they knew but dared not divulge without confirmation.

O
N THE FRIDAY
afternoon Ivor drove himself and Juliet to Ramburgh. It was a brave thing to do, first pushing through the reporters and photographers to get to the car. He told me afterward that getting Juliet through was the hardest part.

He thought for a while, then, “No,” he said, “the hardest fucking part was not giving that
Sun
guy a sock on the jaw. Lovely expression that, don't you think? Does anyone say it anymore?”

I said it was a very good thing he hadn't and felt like a prig. Braver, though, was facing his constituents in Morning-ford and this he did on Saturday. He held his surgery as usual. Someone asked him why he was paying a pension to a man whose injuries happened through his own careless driving. It wasn't the sort of question constituents should ask when they came to their MP for help, but Ivor answered it or, rather, he said that no charge had ever been brought against Dermot Lynch, so it was impossible to say if his driving had been careless or not. By that time he had seen Saturday's newspapers, or one of them, the relevant one.

It had a scoop. On its front page was an interview with a woman who called herself a friend of Hebe Furnal's but who wished to remain anonymous.

I say he had seen the newspaper but he hadn't read the story in the sense of perusing it. The paper, which was regularly delivered to Ramburgh House, where my mother-in-law
was, of course, living, was
The Times,
but the one which had scooped the rest Ivor picked up after he'd parked his car in the Market Square of Morningford. He saw the headline, the picture of Hebe, and he read the first line of one of the paragraphs in her account of things. Then his agent came down the steps to greet him and he had to run the gauntlet of the people waiting to see him.

Presumably, Gerry Furnal had refused to speak to them and so had his wife, Pandora. When I saw the paper and read the story, I found myself hoping against hope (in soppy-father mode) that Hebe's son, Justin, was too young to understand any of it and that no one would ever tell him of it.

Ivor went back to Ramburgh House. He had no local engagement that evening and none on the Sunday. Going home to London on the Sunday morning was an option and he decided to take it. By then he had read the anonymous woman's interview with a journalist twice while sitting in his car, parked in a farm gateway on a quiet stretch of lane. Much of what she said was untrue or, at best, half true. She talked of Hebe's promiscuity, her spending of her hardworking husband's money on “other men.” Hebe had neglected her child, she said, in order to meet her lover “two or three times a week” and had often not returned home until “the small hours.” He had given her a pearl necklace worth seven thousand pounds, which she had told her husband came from the British Home Stores. Ivor's name wasn't mentioned—the anonymous woman didn't know it—only that Hebe's lover was “an important man in government,” which, at that time, he was not. Ivor read the interview a third time. When he came once more to the bit about how he was supposed to have met Hebe so often he said aloud, “I should have been so lucky.”

It was a fine sunny day, warm for October. He could see
the fields, not yet plowed, white with chamomile flowers where the barley had been. I'm not saying this to add color to my narrative. This is the way he described things as he sat there reading and rereading that paper.

He didn't show it to Juliet or his mother. He was an English gentleman, enough of the old school in spite of his
outré
sexual carryings-on, to feel it right to keep unpleasant things from women if he could. Of course they must know it and know it soon, but not yet, not on this glorious day. He ate his lunch, not drinking too much till the evening. He and Juliet went for a walk, through the grounds of Ramburgh House, across the fields to the river and back by the lanes and the village. I know it well; Iris and I have done it many times.

Sometime that evening, in preparation for his departure next day, he must have gone into the room next to the boot room at the back of the house and fetched what he needed to take back to London with him in the morning.

W
HILE IVOR WAS
sitting in his car on the way back from Morningford, Sheila Atherton, Jane's mother, was in her daughter's flat, where she found Jane's diary under the floorboards. I know it was at the precise time, or at any rate on the precise morning, because she told Juliet the date and the time of her discovery when she sent her a copy. She had been walking about the one-room flat when she noticed how a floorboard creaked as she crossed a certain point. Jane's flat wasn't carpeted but scattered with rugs. She moved one of these rugs, lifted a loose floorboard and found the diary, sheets of A4 paper clipped together.

If they ever knew about it, the press must have longed to get hold of the diary. They never did. Sheila Atherton
handed it to the police, though not apparently for quite some time. After all, they had Jane's murderer in custody, which must have been the result of what she told them Jane told
her
about him and his attack on her. Why did she send the copy she made of the diary not to Ivor, but to Juliet? Malice? Revenge? I don't know. You will have seen by now Jane's hatred of Ivor and contempt for him and also the light it sheds on so many dark corners and imponderables. It was because she sent it to Juliet that I have been able to include it, or parts of it, in this account, having first secured Mrs. Atherton's permission as holder of the copyright.

What happened to Hebe's clothes? Those presumably sexy, lap-dancer's,
embarrassing
clothes that poor Jane put on to see how she might entice the window cleaner. Was she wearing them when Sean Lynch made his way in? Perhaps her mother found them in the suitcase in the cupboard and threw them away out of shame.

M
enhellion had cleverly never mentioned Sean Lynch, yet his name seemed to underlie every line. It was all there too, in an experienced journalist's synopsis. We left it to Ivor to get in touch with us, or we did so until the Sunday evening and we had heard nothing. At about seven he phoned us and, hastily getting hold of a babysitter, paying her double time, I drove us to Westminster.

His mother and Juliet had done what he asked and Ivor was alone. He'd aged ten years. His hair hadn't turned white overnight because, contrary to popular belief, that doesn't happen, but there seemed more gray in it than when I'd last seen him. He'd eaten nothing since he left Ramburgh at nine that morning but he'd put away a good deal of whisky and had moved on to red wine. Iris found the fridge well stocked with food by prudent Juliet and she made us sandwiches.

“Someone will ask a question in the House tomorrow,” Ivor said.

“And you'll be there?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion.
“It'll be that cliché about ‘we who are about to die salute thee' crap. I wonder why those poor old Christians bothered to say that. I wouldn't if I were about to be eaten by a lion. I'd tell the emperor to fuck off.”

“D'you think you'll be eaten?”

“Of course. It's the end of me, Rob. I've become the story. No secretaryship of state now. I'll never get into the Cabinet. No re-election. They won't like this in Morningford.”

I asked where Juliet was and he told us she'd stayed behind in Ramburgh. “I considered just breaking things off with her, you know. Tell her it wasn't working out. It's been nice knowing you and please keep the ring.”

“You wouldn't do that,” Iris said, aghast.

“Well, I didn't. I only said I'd considered it.”

We ate the sandwiches, or Iris and I did. Ivor took one but didn't eat it. He opened another bottle of Burgundy and said he'd probably have a hangover in the morning.

“But that may be no bad thing. It will distract me.”

The expensive babysitter phoned then and said Adam was crying and complaining of pains in his stomach, so we had to go. We left at once, Iris already overanxious. There was nothing wrong with Adam. He shut up when he saw us, so I suppose it was a ploy to fetch us home. But I wished we could have stayed longer with Ivor. I hated leaving him alone. He shook hands with me and kissed Iris, which were most unusual actions, but he was already half drunk and I thought that must account for it.