The Birthday Present (11 page)

“You've never said anything like that before, Jane,” she said.

“Maybe not, but she wasn't dead before, was she?”

Responding to that was beneath her notice, I suppose. She said she'd paid “a certain sum” into my bank account in advance of my birthday next month. “A certain sum” with her is always fifty pounds, so of course I said thank you very much, though I don't have a very high opinion of people who think they can buy your affection with money. But, for some reason, talking to her gave me confidence, and when she had rung off I took a deep breath and dialed Ivor Tesham's number. It started to ring. They have red boxes to take home, these ministers, don't they? Boxes full of papers, I imagine, though of what kind I don't know. After the tenth ring he picked up the phone (looking up from those papers, I suppose) and again said, “Yes?” in that supercilious tone I don't think he would use if he expected the Prime Minister on the line.

“This is Jane Atherton.”

A pause. He's great on pauses. Then he said, “Ah, the alibi lady.”

That voice had its effect on me. Not enough to make me cry and put the receiver down, as it did before, but sufficient to sap my energy and make me feel like abandoning
whatever I'd intended to say to him. But what had I intended to say?

“I think we should meet,” I said. “We have things to talk about.”

I don't know what I meant by that or what I would have to say if we did meet. The words just came into my head and I uttered them. I waited for him to be patronizing or insulting. He was neither and so I knew he was afraid.

“Very well,” he said, using a phrase I've read but never heard anyone say before. “When and where?”

He'd refuse if I suggested we meet in Westminster at his place, so I suggested it and he did. How do I, who have never before done anything like this, know how to do it? I said, come to my place instead, and I gave him my address. “Tomorrow evening, seven-thirty?”

He agreed to that and said, “Till then,” in a pleasanter way, and “Good-bye,” in a friendly tone.

I understood why. He had high hopes of me because I'd invited him to my home in the evening. That, in his book, meant I'm willing to sleep with him. He was hoping I'd turn out to be another Hebe, as beautiful and—dare I say it?—as easy.

N
EXT DAY WAS
Wednesday and I went shopping. If Ivor Tesham was coming to my flat I would have to entertain him. At least get something for him to drink. Whisky, gin, vodka, these were the names that ran through my head, but what if he only drank brandy or Burgundy or beer? It was useless and very wasteful to buy anything. I can't afford it. I drank the last of that bottle of wine after I'd talked to him and I shall make him a cup of tea.

Just as I had cold feet about the available drink, I now had
second thoughts about my flat. I doubt if he has ever been anywhere like my flat. It consists of a bed-sitting room, which becomes a kitchen at one end, and the only door apart from the front door leads into the bathroom. There is a table that belonged to my grandmother but was in her sheltered housing living room and isn't the kind of grandmother's table that might be in Ivor Tesham's family, made by Chippendale of course—or did he only make chairs? I have chairs too, the fireside kind with sagging brown seats and wooden arms, and a rug worked by my mother as therapy when she was on medication for depression. My bed can become a sofa, but only does so when someone is visiting because working the mechanism that needs to be set in motion for the conversion to take place is a back-breaking exercise. I used to do it when Hebe visited but haven't since she died. As he was to have tea in lieu of spirits, should I also have let him confront the unmade bed? That he would probably have construed as a further invitation, so I manipulated its hinges and creaking shafts and turned it into a sofa, scattered it tastefully with cushions and massaged my back.

I'd decided by then what I'd say to him. It amused me a bit to think that Hebe's jewelry, the tat as well as the pearls he gave her, were in the kitchen, inside a drawer where I keep the brochures that tell me how to use my minute fridge, baby oven, and mini electric kettle. Perhaps I should ask him if he will confirm that he gave me the pearls when a jeweler rings him up to ask him.

But I knew I wouldn't, because I was quite suddenly overcome with shyness—no, not shyness but fear, real fear. There were three-quarters of an hour to go before he was due and though I'd resolved to do nothing to my appearance and nothing more to the flat—I'd done quite enough—I went into the bathroom and had a shower, washed my hair
and blew it dry with great care, sprayed myself with the last of my perfume and put on my only dress, tights, and the highest-heeled shoes I have, which aren't very high. On an impulse I fastened the pearls round my neck, but quickly took them off again. Hebe was always trying to teach me makeup techniques but I didn't pay much attention and now, when I try to do ambitious things to my eyes, it all goes wrong and I have to wipe it off. I ended up with a sprinkling of powder and some carefully applied lipstick.

He was almost due and I knew he would be on time. His job and the kind of life he leads make sure of that. And just as the green digits on the microwave clock changed from 19:29 to 19:30 the doorbell rang. I pressed the key to let him in and heard it buzz downstairs. A great calm had descended on me and a feeling that nothing mattered anymore.

The photograph in
Dod's
is a good one. The camera hasn't lied. He is very handsome, if you like that kind of chiseled regularity, the thin mouth, the aquiline nose. I couldn't read his expression, what he thought of me, if he thought anything. He said, “Good evening,” and called me Miss Atherton, which made me wonder if I know anyone else who does that. He is a graceful man and elegant in the dark suit and white shirt I suppose he wore in the House of Commons today. Of course he didn't look me up and down with scorn or amusement, and now I wonder how I could have imagined such behavior. Writers sometimes talk about thoughts coming to you “unbidden” and the thought that came to me then I certainly hadn't looked for. I wondered what it must be like to be the sort of woman who was squired about wherever she went by a man who looked like him and spoke like him.

I asked him to sit down in one of the “fireside” chairs and
offered him tea. I was wrong too to think he'd look round my flat incredulously or with contempt. He took it in his stride and the chairs and the tea—only he didn't take the tea. “That's very kind of you but no, thank you,” he said.

What to say to him, how to use this time, maybe half an hour, came to me quite suddenly. I sat down opposite him and said, “You will have been wondering why I asked you here.” Here I made myself pause. “Don't look so worried,” I said, though he didn't. “It's only that I thought you might like something of Hebe's as a keepsake—well, to remember her by.”

He slightly inclined his head. It wasn't quite a nod, more like some one doing what I think is called a court bow. What had he expected me to say? Something about the car and the crash and the gun, I expect. I looked for some sign of relief from him but saw nothing. His color, which is a pale olive, didn't change. I wonder if I am the only person in the world who knows he and Hebe were lovers.

“Hebe's husband asked me to take her jewelry and do what I liked with it. I've been getting rid of her clothes to charity shops. Would you like to see some of the things?”

This time he did speak. “Thank you, I would.”

He has a beautiful voice, measured, civilized, very public school. And now relief was in his tone. I guessed this was because he understood that I'd asked him here not to harangue him or threaten him but simply to make that very ordinary and usual gesture of offering a memento of the dead to the bereaved.

There was nowhere in this flat where I could be out of sight of a visitor but the bathroom. I couldn't pretend Hebe's things were anywhere but where they are, in the kitchen drawer. However, he didn't watch me. He sat in his fireside chair, looking out of the window beside him at the
uninspiring landscape of Kilburn—Brondesbury borders, the terrace of red-brick villas climbing the hillside, the squat Nonconformist church. I took all the jewelry but the pearls out of the drawer, put them on a tray, a plastic thing with a selection of British birds on it, and carried it over to him, putting it down on my mail-order flat-pack coffee table.

He expects to see the pearls, of course, and sees instead the string of red glass beads, the silver-gilt chain off which the gilt is peeling, a red and a green plastic bangle, something which I think is an anklet, a white metal ring with a large pink stone that is probably glass, half a dozen pairs of earrings, trashy sparkly things, and a pink porcelain brooch in the shape of a rose.

“She had some good things too,” I said, and I know he thought I was going to mention the pearls. “Her engagement ring, a locket, and a gold bracelet. Gerry wants to keep those, as you can imagine.”

“Quite,” he said, because he had to say something.

The last thing I had expected was happening to me. I was enjoying myself. I felt something I've never known before. It's power I feel and it's heady. Was he going to ask about the pearls? He wasn't. He couldn't quite bring himself to do it. He couldn't say, I gave her a valuable necklace because I thought I would be her lover and she would be mine for years. I didn't give it to her husband. But no, he couldn't. He would rather lose five thousand pounds or whatever the pearls are worth than expose himself to me as mean and greedy. Probably, he was brought up to think talking about money was vulgar. I should be so lucky.

“Is there anything you would like?” I said, so full of power that I had to stop myself laughing out loud.

“Perhaps this little brooch?” He picked up the china rose.

I smiled and said, “It's quite pretty, isn't it? I'll find a box to put it in.”

The box I found contained the red beads. I put the china rose inside it and, as I did so, I laid my hand for a moment on the black leather case where the pearls lie in their pink velvet bed.

Ivor Tesham thanked me too profusely. It's all terribly kind of me. He added that he knows I was a good friend to Hebe. Then power got the better of me and I said, “Because I lied for her and deceived her husband?” I laughed loudly to take the sting out of that and, after a stunned moment, he laughed too. He hadn't shaken hands with me when he arrived but he did then. I listened to his footsteps going fast, too fast, down the stairs and the front door being closed too sharply.

Did he wonder what Hebe, who was so beautiful and sexy, saw in me? Did he wonder why she called me her friend? He doesn't know how much she enjoyed having someone to patronize and show herself off against, the sparrow that no one notices when the golden oriole perches next to it.

G
ERRY PHONED ME
and I couldn't help feeling he had only got in touch with me when he had exhausted all other possibilities. He had no one to look after Justin on Friday, so could I come? There are some people, especially men, who think others don't have to work. But considering I had been thinking I might never see him again, this was good news, so I said I would take the day off work and come. This time Justin didn't turn his back on me. He didn't tell me to go away but let me kiss him when I arrived and put his arms
round my neck. And Gerry seemed pleased to see me, telling me how grateful he was for all I'd done. He could rely on me the way he couldn't on anyone else. He wished I lived nearer.

I went out into the hallway with him when he was leaving for work. Saying, “Oh, Jane, I miss her so,” he put his arms round me and hugged me. It was the first time anyone had held me like that for years. I could feel his warmth through my clothes and his heart beating. Back in the kitchen after he'd gone, I lifted Justin out of his high chair and danced about with him in my arms, singing, “Here we go gathering nuts in May, nuts in May, nuts in May …” until he shrieked with laughter.

Gerry would marry again. Why shouldn't he marry me? I was much more suited to him than Hebe had ever been. I wouldn't be unfaithful to him. Justin would soon love me as much as he'd loved her. Gerry wouldn't have hugged me like that if I hadn't begun to mean something to him. Was he beginning to see that Hebe had never been much of a wife to him, never really loved him?

As I put Justin into his buggy and prepared to walk him down to the Welsh Harp and the fields of Kingsbury Green, I realized I didn't know how to catch and keep a man. I didn't know how to begin except by being there, someone he relied on more than anyone else.

T
he trouble with being a minister, Jack Munro once said to me, is that you're an MP as well. You don't stop representing your constituents in Parliament just because you've been made an Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, or, as in Ivor's case, Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Defence. In the two years he'd been in Parliament Ivor had been a good constituency MP, holding his surgeries at fairly regular weekly intervals, accepting as many engagements in Morningford as was possible for anyone who couldn't be in two places at once, giving a sympathetic ear to the concerns of constituents. And once he became a minister he kept it up. He was ambitious; he wanted to be good and be seen to be good. But it was hard. No one pretends it isn't hard. Only the indispensable mass, the people who put you there, the electorate, haven't the faintest idea.

Ivor acquitted himself well. He sat on the government frontbench when there was room for the lowlier ministers; he spoke well and at not too great length. He attended the
innumerable meetings which are a minister's lot and in July, a week before the House rose for the summer recess, flew off for two days to the Balkans to give support and comfort to our Air Power Overseas. And when the House had adjourned on a Thursday and he could leave, he drove down to Ramburgh, all prepared for his Saturday-morning surgery, for opening the flower show or the harvest festival, for speaking in the evening at the Conservatives' annual dinner or the Chamber of Commerce High Street Traders' Supper.