The Birthday Present (12 page)

On August 2 Iraq invaded and overran Kuwait. U.S. forces, sup ported by troops from various European, Arab, and Asian countries, were sent to Saudi in an attempt to shield the kingdom from Iraqi assault. Although the Commons wasn't sitting, all this kept Ivor even busier than usual. The crisis deepened and made more work for him when Iraq announced on August 28 that Kuwait had become the nineteenth Iraqi governorate and extended the borders of Basra south into Kuwait, thus creating a new province. This situation, in which Ivor was closely involved, might have been thought so much bigger and more momentous than his personal problem as to make it seem petty, perhaps even to distract him from it. But we human beings aren't like that. Those things that are close to home, matters which affect our individual pride and reputation and the way we are viewed by others, those come first.

Whatever decisions he made, no matter how often and how far he traveled, he still carried his burden of stress. He was never free of worry. Dermot Lynch was always in the forefront of his mind. Those weekends when he was in Morningford and not in West minster or the Middle East he would always find an hour to come over to us at Monks Cravery. He came to talk, to unburden his soul, I suppose. We were the only people he could talk to, for although others
knew some of it—Nicola Ross, for instance, knew he had had a girlfriend he never talked about and that he had known Lloyd Freeman; Hebe's nameless friend, the “alibi lady,” knew a little more than that—we alone knew the whole thing from start to finish. The whole sorry mess, as he put it.

Nothing more had been heard of Dermot. I might say that nothing ever was heard of him; the newspapers had only mentioned him during the first couple of weeks after the accident. It wouldn't have been much of a story for them, I could see that, especially if he recovered fully and was liable to be up in court on a charge of causing death by dangerous driving. They would have to be very discreet about anything like that in the offing.

All the time Ivor knew that the thing he was worried about wasn't the thing he ought to be worried about. Hebe's death was what should have concerned him, hers and Lloyd Freeman's, but he hardly thought about their deaths. And he cared very little about Dermot's guilt or innocence in the matter of who caused the crash. He was solely troubled about the man's regaining consciousness and talking to the police. Or the press or anyone at all, come to that. And, of course, he imagined him saying, “It wasn't a real abduction. This MP called Mr. Ivor Tesham set it up as a kind of joke. Hebe Furnal was his girlfriend and he wanted her kidnapped and handcuffed and gagged and brought to his house. For her birthday. Like a game.”

Something else that constantly bothered Ivor was the gun. The handcuffs he knew about, they were part of his planned scenario, and the balaclavas and the gag and the blacked-out windows in the car, but not the gun. One of them, Dermot or Lloyd, must have brought that gun along as a bit of additional color, a surely indispensable adjunct in their
Hollywood-driven ideas of what an abduction should be. The gun was a serious business; that it had been in the car at all was serious. The chance of its being connected to him made Ivor physically shiver. I saw a shiver actually run through him when he talked about it, sitting in our cottage by the log fire, for it was autumn by then and turning cold.

“I'm obsessed with Dermot Lynch,” he said. “I dream about him. I dream about him in bed in that hospital, just moving his hand and opening his eyes. Then he opens his mouth and he speaks my name. His mother's there and she says she can't hear him and to say it again. It's his mother to the life in her overall and her slippers. She sits there holding his hand and he moves his hand and she's so happy.”

I tell him he needs a drink and I'll get him one, but he says no, he's driving, and he reminds me that though he now has a government car, using it and the driver who comes with it for constituency work is forbidden. He's got to be back in Morningford by seven. All he needs now is to compound his villainy by being done for driving over the limit.

Iris says, “How do you know his mother wears an overall and slippers? You haven't ever seen her, have you?”

There was silence and then he told us. This man was in his thoughts all the time until he couldn't stand it any longer without doing something. He'd gone on the tube up to Paddington, but found when he got there that Warwick Avenue would have been the nearer station to William Cross Court in Rowley Place. He walked, aided by the London
A
—
Z,
over Brunel's bridge, through an underpass under the Westway and up into the genteel streets of Little Venice and Maida Vale. William Cross Court, built in the 1970s, had been sandwiched in between gracious stucco villas. It was a sprawling block of mustard-colored council flats with washing hung out to dry and bicycles on the balconies. Ivor might
have been to Eton and Brasenose but he was an MP who'd done his canvassing along council-flat walkways. It wasn't new to him. He wasn't surprised that the hallways were covered in graffiti and the lift was out of order. He walked up to flat 23, not knowing what he was going to do when he got there.

As he came to the top of the third flight the door of number 23 opened and a woman came out. She was about sixty but startlingly like Dermot, or he was like her. That was when he saw the overall and the slippers. A parcel had been left on the step outside her front door and she had come out to pick it up. Ivor walked on past, up the fourth flight, and she didn't see him. Or she took no notice of him if she did.

“You didn't speak to her?” Iris asked.

“Of course I didn't. Of course not.”

“What was the point of going there?”

“I don't know,” Ivor said. “I know Dermot used to live there but I didn't know if his mother was living there alone or the brother lived there with her. I suppose I went there because I feel I can't go on like this. I can't but I have to, I've no choice. Since then I've found out everything I can about the family, but it doesn't exactly help. I mean, the brother's called Sean and he's some sort of builder. He's not married or anything.”

I asked what “or anything” meant.

“Cohabiting, as we politicians say,” said Ivor.

“And Dermot wasn't?”

“It appears not. They're first-generation English. Both parents came over from Ireland in the 1960s and lived first in Kilburn.”

“What's the point of knowing all this?” Iris said.

“I don't know.” Poor Ivor gave what Iris tells me 1920s novelists used to call a mirthless laugh. “There wasn't any
point. I tell myself I'm interested because I ought to do something for the Lynches. Because it was my fault, if you see what I mean. Of course you see what I mean. But Lloyd Freeman's dying was just as much my fault, you could say, and I haven't done anything about him. But he had a girl-friend he'd been cohabiting with.”

“Well, don't do anything about him,” Iris said. “You've got enough on your plate with Dermot Lynch.”

“I want him not to recover. If I spell it out frankly, I want him to die. Isn't that the most appalling thing you've ever heard? Doesn't it make you want to turn me out of your house? He's done me no harm, yet I want him to die. I must be an utter shit.

“I know which hospital he's in. I know the name of the ward. I think I could bluff my way in to see him. I imagine that happening. I dream about it. I see myself sitting by his bed, waiting for him to wake up. And then I'm talking to a doctor, a consultant, and he's telling me he'll never wake up, and I'm so happy I start laughing and everyone stands around me and stares.”

So it went on. He came back next day. He'd done his red boxes, which were sent to his constituency, and he was on his way home to London.

“I meant to go over to Leicestershire,” he said, “and see Erica Caxton, but I haven't had a moment. I try to see her and the children as often as I can.” Ivor never said “kids,” though both young Caxtons were well into their teens. “I'll go next weekend.”

We had tea and he told us what it meant to be a minister. His Private Secretary was a woman called Emma, in charge of organizing his life, keeping her eye on him, and keeping him on the straight and narrow path. Iris asked him what he called her and he said “Emma” but, according to protocol,
she called him “Minister.” It was the same for all his officials. However, so decreed the tribal custom, he and his Permanent Secretary exchanged Christian names. Ivor liked all this, as one does enjoy the arcane rules of a club one belongs to, rules that are incomprehensible to those outside Whitehall and the pale, which is the walls of the Palace of Westminster.

But I had the impression all the time he was talking that he valued it more than he might have done previously because he saw it as being under threat now. A word to the media about what had happened that evening in May and what hadn't happened—his going to the police, his admitting to them his part in it—would bring down all this dignity and responsibility and power. Not at once, of course. It would begin with a snide diary paragraph, be taken up next day perhaps as a few lines in an article on government sleaze. And then, after three or four days of this, would come the single-column story, the interview with him, the police comment, the few words from a “friend” in Parliament or his constituency. By the end of the week it would be on the front page, in the tabloids the lead, as the kidnap, the gun, and the two deaths reappeared in print. By then his resignation would have been asked for or he would have voluntarily resigned.

None of this was said that afternoon. We had said it all before. After he'd gone Iris asked me if I didn't think Ivor was “seeing rather a lot of Erica Caxton.”

“I don't know,” I said. “He's not seeing her at all today. He hasn't got time.”

“I'm not finding fault. I quite like the idea. Isn't it time he got married?”

I said she was years older than he and her husband had only been dead a few months.

“Only four years older,” Iris said. “I'm not saying anything would happen straight away, I said I like the idea. You know Mother and Dad will give up Ramburgh House to him and move into the lodge. I wouldn't mind Erica for a sister-in-law.”

That was never to happen. I mention it only because of the events that followed, or, rather, one event.

B
ACK IN MAY,
the kidnap story had driven Sandy Caxton's murder from the front pages. But the inside pages kept it in the public mind.

Questions were asked in the House (and repeatedly in the papers) as to the guarding of former Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland. Wasn't it taken for granted that such people were protected not merely during the time they held that office but for the rest of their lives?

Since Sandy's death a series of IRA attacks had been carried out in mainland Britain and West Germany. Hooded men shot dead a young soldier and wounded his two companions as they waited for a train on Lichfield station. A bomb on the roof of the Honour able Artillery Company in London exploded, injuring seventeen civilians, most of them students at a twenty-first birthday party. Another, planted a few feet inside the doorway of the Carlton Club, haunt of Tory grandees, seriously injured a porter and wounded two others. And there were many more, including the murder of a nun in County Armagh and an explosion at the London Stock Exchange.

At the end of July, in an assassination which seemed an echo of Sandy Caxton's murder, Ian Gow, the member for Eastbourne and at one time PPS to Margaret Thatcher and a Minister of State at the Treasury, was killed when an IRA
bomb exploded under his car in the village of Hatcham, near Eastbourne, where he lived. In a statement issued next day, the IRA said Gow had been killed because he had been central to the formulation of British policy in Northern Ireland, including that during the hunger strikes of the early 1980s and the shoot-to-kill operations of 1982. Like Sandy's, Gow's name had been found on an IRA death list discovered in a south London flat in 1988.

There was nothing in the papers or on the television as to police investigations or attempts to find Sandy Caxton's killers until a small paragraph appeared in the
Evening Standard
a week after Ivor's visit to us in Cravery. All it said was that a London man was helping the police in their inquiries into Sandy's murder. I read it but took no more notice of it than would any other member of the public, indignant at the outrage. Next morning things were different. This was headline news. The man the police had been holding for thirty-six hours was Sean Brendan Lynch, 29, of Padding-ton, west London.

I was pretty sure Ivor would be aware of it. He read at least two papers a day from front page to back, every word. But I thought I ought to see him. I wondered if he understood the seriousness of this and I phoned him and asked if I could come into the Commons for a drink at six that evening.

He said, “You've seen it, then?”

When we met he told me he had read it in his office. All the papers were placed on a table there every morning, of course, and the
Standard
appeared around lunchtime. Mostly, he had no time to go anywhere for lunch. The days of lunching out at a leisurely pace were gone. His lunch was brought to him, two sandwiches and a bottle of sparkling water, and he made the mistake of offering one of the sandwiches to
Emma. “Oh, no, thank you, Minister,” she said in shocked tones.

The
Standard
had been brought in. He took a bite out of one of the sandwiches, got up to read the lead story, something about the Prime Minister and Geoffrey Howe, then an account of a rape trial. Underneath, at the foot of the front page, was a paragraph headed “London Man in Caxton Killing Probe.” He said he gripped the edge of the table where the papers lay, afraid he might fall. For the first time in his life he knew that sensation of the room going round and he hardly knew how he kept himself from crying out. Fear of Emma coming rushing in, no doubt, or the Assistant Secretary or the Deputy Secretary.

“I told myself to read it again,” he said. “I knew I must read it, however much I longed to chuck the whole thing into the wastepaper basket. I read it but got no more out of it. A man called Sean Brendan Lynch was at a police station, answering questions, being interrogated. Because, obviously, he was suspected of being a member of the IRA, very likely
was
a member of the IRA, and must have done something or been concerned in something to make him a suspect in Sandy's assassination.”