The Birthday Present (20 page)

Gerry was out. After all that nonsense about needing a television, about how it was the only thing to distract him from his memories, he had abandoned it the first day it arrived and gone off to make a speech at some charity do. It was quite pleasant to have the place to myself for a change. No television for me, of course. I was glad to do without it. I fetched the scrapbook down and quite enjoyed going through it, from the first picture of Tesham at Sandy Caxton's funeral to the most recent, Our Hero (as I call him to myself) presenting some award or medal to a flight lieutenant.

Justin must have fallen asleep, for there was no more noise from upstairs. I tried to imagine Tesham paying those men,
explaining
to them what he wanted, waiting for Hebe to come and cursing when she didn't. When he had been thwarted. None of this was at all hard for me to picture. I wondered too, if she had all that gear, did he have
sex toys?
I don't really know what sex toys are, I've heard the term, that's all. Dildoes, perhaps, and furry objects. Did they play with them? Thinking of him, his suave manner and his austere looks, I couldn't imagine it and I stopped then, because you can only get excited up to a point, after which you start to feel sick.

F
or all Ivor might say about suburban houses and double garages, he seemed to like visiting us, with or without Juliet. He was fond of our children, which rather surprised me, I don't know why, and he had found a young adorer in Nadine. His car, which he parked in the street in Westminster, kept taking knocks from passing drivers, once quite a serious dent in the offside, and he asked us if he could keep it in our second garage “just until he moved,” what ever that meant.

When he came up to fetch it for the drive out to his constituency, he would arrive early and those talks we had used to have about the situation he found himself in two and a half years before resumed. Up to a point, that is. Now what he said was more a reflection on the things that had happened, even a kind of wonder that he had been almost mad with anxiety, with terror of what the following morning would bring, unable to sleep and always on the verge of a panic, which must at all costs be concealed.

“I used to feel,” he said, “like that character in Shakespeare who says he'd like to read the book of fate, so that I could have some idea of what would happen next week, even next day.”

I said he wouldn't like it if he could. We only want access to the book of fate when we can read something favorable to us in it. What if it had told him Dermot Lynch would come round next Thursday in full possession of his faculties and memory? He laughed. He actually laughed.

“On the subject of Dermot Lynch,” Iris said, “I take it you've kept to what you said and haven't been near that family?”

“I suppose I may as well tell you,” he said.

Nadine came into the room then and climbed onto Ivor's knee. Half an hour later he'd fetched the car and gone to pick up Juliet for their weekend in Morningford. It must have been about a fortnight later that I was in Maida Vale, visiting a client who lived in one of those big Italianate houses that front onto the canal in Blomfield Road. As well as being wheelchair-bound, my very wealthy client never answered letters and nor did his wife, so I had no choice but to go to him, taking with me a number of forms that needed signing for the Inland Revenue. It was almost Christmas, a day or two before Christmas Eve. Christmas trees were glittering with lights in the windows, holly wreaths hung on front doors, and there were strings of lights along the canal. After I left my client I lingered awhile, leaning over the railing to look along the shining stretch of water up to the lights in the café on the bridge.

I began to walk down toward the underground station, not to get into the tube—no one in his senses would try to travel by tube from Maida Vale to where we lived—but to
hail one of the taxis which head up Warwick Avenue from Clifton Gardens. I was about halfway down, looking in vain for taxis coming that way and from the opposite direction, when I noticed the couple who had walked over the bridge and were waiting to cross Blomfield Road. It was dark but a clear evening and I couldn't have been mistaken. The two people, arm in arm, now halfway across, were Ivor and Juliet Case. I started to hail them, lifting my right arm, but the taxi driver, coming at last, took this for a summons to him and stopped for me. I got in; I wanted to get home. Whether or not Ivor had seen me I didn't then know.

“Where do you think they'd been?” Iris asked when I told her.

I said I didn't know. How would I know? Paddington Station?

“Why would Ivor go to Paddington Station or come from Pad dington Station? On foot? He wouldn't. I'll tell you where they'd been. To William Cross Court.”

I'd forgotten the name. I'd forgotten who lived there. I had to ask her.

“The Lynches, of course. Mrs. Lynch and her sons live in William Cross Court. It's in Rowley Place and Rowley Place runs from St. Mary's Gardens to Warwick Avenue. Don't look at me like that, Rob, I do
know.
I looked the place up in the
A–Z
when I was phoning her for Ivor.”

“He wouldn't go there,” I said. “He might have done once but not now. Why would he?”

“I'm going to ask him.”

And she did. Christmas happened first, of course. Both children were by then of an age to be in paroxysms of excitement anticipating the day. Wearing a white beard and dressed in Iris's hooded red dressing gown with cotton wool stitched onto it in appropriate places, I sat on the stairs for
hours without number, my sack of stocking gifts beside me, waiting for them to go to sleep. I don't think Nadine ever did sleep that night. I unloaded my presents into her stocking at five in the morning while she gazed at me enraptured, having no notion then that I might be only her father in disguise. I could go on and on about that Christmas, joy and glory for Iris and me as much as for our children, but I won't. I'll proceed to Ivor, who came alone on Boxing Day, bearing gifts.

I
MAY AS
well tell you, he had said a few weeks ago. Then Nadine's interruption had put it out of our heads. “It's absolutely all right,” was how he began now, and varying it, “Absolutely okay. Juliet's been visiting them since before Dermot came out of hospital. She and Philomena are friends.”

“Philomena?
You mean you're on those sorts of terms?”

“I don't know what you mean by ‘those sorts of terms,' Iris. It's usual these days for people to call each other by their Christian names or hadn't you noticed? Juliet suggested I go there with her one day and I did. They wanted to see me. It was all perfectly pleasant and friendly, and a great relief, I can tell you.”

He did tell us and it took quite a long time. At first, when Juliet suggested he go and visit Philomena Lynch and see Dermot, he was adamant. Absolutely not, he had said, it's out of the question. But they don't bear you any ill will, she said. He asked her how much they knew.

“Dermot told Sean about it when you first asked him,” she said. “I don't think Philomena knows. They wouldn't have said anything to her for fear she'd have been shocked, as she would have been, Ivor. She's an old-fashioned, deeply religious
woman. She's a staunch Catholic. But Sean knew from the start. He says he and Dermot had a laugh about it.”

All this had happened in the previous summer, when Ivor was still sufficiently alive to the danger he was in to shudder at those words. Sean had to know, Juliet went on, because Dermot wanted to borrow his gun. It was true that Sean bought the gun from a man in Warsaw who was trying to get American dollars or British sterling together to escape the country, but his motive in buying it wasn't as naïve and innocent as she had first told him. Sean had a criminal record, which was why the police had questioned him over Sandy Caxton's murder. At this point in Ivor's narrative Iris let out a cry of horror.

“I think you must be mad!”

Ivor shrugged. “Wait till you hear the rest of it.”

“It can't get any worse, that's for sure.”

Juliet said to him that Dermot was living on some government allowance which is now called Invalidity Benefit but had a different name then. He would never work again. His mother went out cleaning. Sean was a builder's laborer but the work wasn't regular, it was sporadic, and often there was none at all. It was this that changed Ivor's mind for him. Or so he said. Well, he was an English gentleman and English gentlemen are good to the poor. They perform charitable acts to the lower orders and hand out eleemosynary alms.

“I suppose I ought to do something for them,” he said.

Juliet thought he ought. “I hoped you would say that,” she said.

Next day, she phoned Mrs. Lynch and the two of them went over to William Cross Court. Ivor must have noted the contrast between this visit and his last. Then he had skulked about on the stairs, hiding from observers; now he
went as a prospective honored guest. It was the end of July and the beginning of the parliamentary summer recess. William Cross Court, which he had in his mind labeled a dump, looked rather nice in the sunshine, flowers on some of the balconies and more in Westminster Council's neat flowerbeds. The lawns were bright green, with not a weed showing.

“I suppose you thought,” Iris said, “that made it all respectable.”

“As a matter of fact that's exactly what I did think.”

It was at this point that I wondered what would have happened if I hadn't seen him and Juliet walking along Warwick Avenue that evening. If, for instance, I hadn't spent two minutes leaning on that railing and admiring the canal and the lights. Would he ever have told us? Would he have changed his mind about having something “I may as well tell you,” said nothing of this visit and subsequent visits to the Lynches' until disaster came—if disaster was to come? I think so. But I had lingered and I had seen him and now it was all coming out.

Sean Lynch opened the front door. Ivor said he couldn't believe his eyes when this man—this bricklayer or whatever he was, this one-time criminal, this suspect in his friend's murder—put his hand on Juliet's shoulder and kissed her on the cheek.

“It took a bit of getting used to, that,” he said, and then, oddly, “Of course, things are different now. I somehow thought he'd call her ‘Miss Case.' I thought they'd all be tremendously respectful.”

“When are you going to start living in the real world, Ivor?” Iris was furious. “These people are probably planning just how they're going to blackmail you.”

“No,” he said in a vague, dreamy sort of way. “No, they're
not. It's not like that. Philomena was rather awestruck. I suppose you'd call that respectful. She kept saying she couldn't believe I was actually in her flat. An MP, she kept saying, a Minister of the Crown.”

“Oh, my God,” Iris said. “I don't believe it. I'll wake up in a minute.”

“It was horrible,” he said, “seeing Dermot. I remember him as a very lively, jolly sort of chap, the sort of man who'd be dumb if he lost the use of his hands. He was always gesticulating, holding his hands up, clapping, flicking his fingers. He never moves them now. He can walk—shuffle, rather. His speech is like—well, you know what a Dalek sounds like. Or a zombie. Juliet told me afterward that whole areas of his brain are gone, just lost.”

Mrs. Lynch had given them tea that first time and a cake she said was “Mr Kipling.” She talked a lot about Mr. Kipling cakes and how good they were, though not a patch on something called Kunzle cakes, which were in vogue when she was a girl. Sean kept telling her to give it a rest, no one was interested, and what would Mr. Tesham think of her. They were still calling him Mr. Tesham then, though that changed on his next visit. Dermot had a towel tied round his neck to protect his clothes while he ate his cake. He got chocolate icing all over his face and Philomena had to fetch a wet flannel to clean him up. He appeared not to recognize Ivor, which was something of a relief. On the way there Ivor had worried about that, imagining him jumping up, the scales falling from his eyes, and presumably too his mind, as he denounced the author of all his sufferings. Eating his cake and drinking his cup of mahogany-colored tea, Ivor saw—with very real pity and horror, I believe—that Dermot was beyond all that; Dermot was in a different world, a place of shadows and incomprehension and oblivion.

As for Sean, Ivor confessed that he had never before come across anyone like him. It was unusual for him to be frank about his own lack of experience in any aspect of life. There was no question from the start, he said, of taking him for other than what he was, for he exuded menace, he radiated ruthlessness, he would be a good person to have on one's side if one were in trouble.

“And you think he's on yours,” I said.

“Some of the things he said made me believe so.”

Iris made that sound that is usually written “Huh.” “What about the other things? The menace, for instance?”

“That wasn't directed at me. I'd arranged with Juliet that I wouldn't mention money that first time. All I said was that I'd like to do something for them and that I'd come back and we'd talk about it.”

He went back two days later but without Juliet this time. The arrangement he'd made was for six in the evening and he took a bottle of champagne with him. While Iris was asking him why and where did he get his crazy ideas from, I was thinking of the champagne he'd left in our fridge on the night of the birthday present. Ivor was a great one for champagne. Once I heard him refer to it as “the drink that is never wrong” or TDTINW. I think he saw it as the panacea for all ills, the smoother-out of all difficulties, the breaker of all possible kinds of ice. And, of course, the bringer of desire and stimulus to the libido.

Again it was Sean who opened the door. “Mr. Tesham” was dropped and he greeted him as “Ivor.” “How are you doing, Ivor?” were his words. But instead of according the champagne as enthusiastic a welcome, he said in a repressive tone that he didn't drink. Never had, didn't like the taste. Anything alcoholic was out of the question for Dermot, but Ivor opened the champagne (elegantly, I expect, as he always
did, without spilling a drop) and he and Philomena Lynch settled down to drink it. Out of pottery mugs. There were no glasses in the place, not even the water kind. No one ever drank water or, come to that, fruit juice, or anything but tea.