The Birthday Present (22 page)

The restaurant we went to was in Westminster, very near Ivor's flat, halfway in fact between his flat, currently “under offer,” as the estate agents say, and his new house in Glanvill Street. Because the house-hunter had found somewhere for him, an elegant Georgian three-story place with five steps up to the front door and lacework railings on the balconies. After supper we went round to look at it, lit up by the old-fashioned lamps in the square.

“And Juliet is coming to live there with me,” Ivor said, putting his arm lightly round her shoulders. “I think she likes the idea of being the only woman I have ever lived with.”

A
N INVITATION CAME
to Ivor's housewarming. Having a party to celebrate his move wasn't the kind of thing he did. It must be Juliet's idea, we decided, for Juliet was gaining a hold over him as no woman had done before. Recalling Iris's taunt when Ivor had called Sean Lynch a friend of his, I
asked her what the betting was that this man wouldn't be at the party, and I thought she'd say that went without saying. Of course he wouldn't be there.

“We shall see,” she said, “but I'm going to take you on. Ten pounds he's there.”

“You can't be serious.”

“I am, perfectly serious. Sean Lynch will be at that party and we'll be introduced to him.”

Ivor's house was very nice inside, but it was exactly what anyone who knows the Georgian houses of London that have undergone a makeover would have expected. The previous owners had converted the ground floor into a kind of open plan but segmented into a number of alcoves and areas divided by arches or a series of columns. It was furnished— by a design company or by Juliet?—with perfect correctness for its period. Little groups of chairs and low tables stood about, portraits hung on the walls and, in the main open areas, political cartoons of the Gillray era. The curtains at windows both at the front and at the back hung sheer to the floor, heavy satin drapes in a deep bronze. A spinet and a gilded jardinière each supported large flower arrangements.

We had been there perhaps five minutes, already noticing that there were far more guests than either of us had expected, when Ivor came up to us with a stocky man in a too tight suit in tow. Jack Munro and his wife, who had been on their way to us, turned abruptly in the opposite direction and headed instead for Erica Caxton. It seemed to me that Ivor greeted us with more effusive ness than usual. He introduced us to his companion, a stocky red-faced man.

“Iris, Robin, I want you to meet my friend Sean Lynch.”

If we had been at a table Iris would have kicked me under it. Her broad smile and readily extended hand were a metaphorical kick. I too shook hands, while Ivor made some
of the most flagrant small talk I have ever heard. What did we think of his table lamps? They had been made for him by a marvelous woman in West Halkin Street. The eighteenth-century French clock we would recognize as coming from Ramburgh. Living here was very convenient, it being not only near the Circle Line at St. James's Park but no more than ten minutes' walk from Pimlico tube station. I thought of Hebe, who might, had she lived, have had her home even nearer that station.

Having done his duty, Ivor passed on, first to encounter Nicola Ross in draped black and white satin and then Aaron Hunter in jeans and leather jacket. Reluctantly I turned my attention to this man I'd been sure wouldn't be there and didn't much want to know. There is a certain cast of face I think of as essentially Irish. It is full and rather fleshy but with fine features, the nose aquiline, the eyes dark and full of fire, the mouth thin-lipped but sensitive, turned up at its corners in the precursor of a smile. Sean Lynch was exactly like that, a broad powerful-looking man, not very tall, but instead of dark hair, his was a curious brownish-yellow and curly, long enough to reach his shoulders. He also looked a brute. I half expected him to talk with an Irish lilt, but when he spoke it was with the accent of Paddington Green.

I had barely heard what he'd been saying to Iris and she to him as he stood there cockily with a glass of orange juice in his hand. I remembered then that Ivor had told us he didn't drink. He had refused Ivor's champagne when they talked about the money he and his mother were offered. I didn't know what to say to him. The only thing I came up with, which I hope wasn't loaded or sly or probing, was, “How long have you known my brother-in-law?”

I need not have worried. He took over the conversation. “Not long,” he said. “Not long at all.” And there I heard the
note of Irishism, something he must have picked up from a parent. If I couldn't think of much to say to him he wasn't similarly inhibited with me and soon he was in full flow. “Long enough to know him for a true gentleman. What a wonderful man he is. It's not often you find a man of his class who's got no side, not a scrap of side in his makeup. And generous too, the soul of generosity. I'll tell you something, I reckon I'm the only
working
man here, but does he let that make any difference? No, he does not. He does not. He's introduced me to some of the most famous people in the land since I've been here. In the land …”

And so he went on. We had his disabled brother, his saintly mother on her hands and knees to earn a bare subsistence, his own inability to find work due to various injustices in his past—he didn't elaborate on this—his girlfriend's adoration and awe of the great man, so intense as to make him, Sean, quite jealous. Here he laughed throatily, shaking his head so that his curls bounced from side to side. He'd do anything for Ivor, he said, anything. Anything. Say the word and he was on. He looked like a hit man and the implications of what he said didn't bear thinking about.

We were rescued at last by Juliet, who had come to take him away and drag him round the half-rooms and between the pillars to meet various minor celebrities of right-wing persuasion. It was Iris, not I, who said she looked stunningly beautiful in a simple white dress, her hair piled up but with tendrils escaping the golden combs, like one of those Jane Austen heroines on film, an Emma or a Marianne Dashwood.

We had no intention of staying long. Iris was expecting our third child and, though very well, got tired easily, but such parties are not always straightforward to escape from. We were on the point of leaving, Iris whispering to me that
she wanted her tenner now, on the nail, when Ivor was back at our side, introducing a QC who lived next door. His name was Martin Trenant, John Major would give him a peerage in his resignation honors, and I mention him because he played a small but significant part in what was to come. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that he saved Ivor's life. Just by being there, by being at home and having a key.

I knew none of that at the time, of course. We talked— about what? The neighborhood, I suppose, and Trenant's wife being away in Marrakesh and the sudden cold snap. Then Nicola Ross came up to us, warm and effusive as ever, her arms spread to hug us, her talk punctuated with “darlings.” Martin Trenant melted away and Nicola began talking about Juliet, that she was lovely enough for the most discerning but still she, Nicola, would never have imagined her and Ivor as an item, never in a thousand years.

In the taxi home Iris and I talked about Sean Lynch, his obvious admiration and fondness for Ivor. It was hero-worship, but Iris was sure it was sincere. The way he'd talked, she said, and the way he looked, made her see him as Ivor's bodyguard, though why he should need a bodyguard she couldn't tell.

We weren't so far wrong except in one respect. Ivor wasn't afraid of these people. He had no fear of Juliet and none of Sean. He seemed to have cast out fear once he'd made that offer to the Lynches and I saw him as becoming more and more like the Ivor of his first years in Parliament, the Ivor who had picked up Hebe Furnal in two short sentences and several appreciative glances, and had leapt up flights of stairs, summoned by the division bell.

Well, we were wrong in another way too. If we hadn't under stood the Lynches' motives, we hadn't understood Juliet at all. Perhaps we weren't naïve but cynical.

•   •   •

A
T RAMBURGH MY
mother-in-law remained in the house and Ivor seemed happy with this arrangement. He took Juliet down there every time he visited his constituency and his visits to his constituency were frequent. Remembering our own creepings about pass ages in the dark during our engagement, Iris asked him what “Ma” thought of their sharing a room while they stayed there.

“I know you're only trying to wind me up,” he said in rather a lofty way, “but don't be quite so silly. I'm thirty-six years old.”

This wasn't an answer but she didn't pursue it. Ivor, we knew, though he had never been explicit on the subject, was looking toward a secretaryship of state and with it a seat in the Cabinet. There was talk of it. One “quality” daily had gone so far as to suggest him as a suitable Home Secretary, young for the post but not perhaps too young. There appeared to be only one serious unlikelihood of this ever happening: the Conservatives had been in power for nearly fifteen years, a long time for any administration, and the electorate were beginning to think they might prefer the Labour Party. The
Sun
newspaper helped by taking every opportunity to slam the Tories, quite open about wanting to get rid of them. A general election, in the normal course of things, would still be more than three years off, but it could come soon if dissatisfaction with the Tories continued to grow. Ivor must have felt acutely the passing of time while his status remained unchanged. There was a lot of talk in the papers about women's biological clocks running down as, successful in their careers but unmarried and childless, they moved nearer the menopause. Ivor's was his political clock and it was ticking away toward his party's climacteric.

In those days of sleaze, with one Tory after another finding him self in trouble, his name sullied by sexual misbehavior, perjury, or other offenses, Ivor retained his pure image. He was clean and manifestly seen to be clean. The only cloud on his horizon, and it was a very small wisp of a cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, was that he was living with a woman he wasn't married to. Of course times had changed. Very few people saw anything wrong in cohabitation. Ivor wasn't divorced, he had never been married, he had jilted no one, left no woman to bring up his child as a single mother. But he lived with a woman he wasn't married to. She was, apparently, a nice, good, and undeniably beautiful woman. It was true she had been divorced and all the newspapers knew who she'd been married to. But this was rather liked; it had a touch of glamour about it. There had even been a photograph in one paper of Juliet chatting to Aaron Hunter with Ivor standing beside her. No newspaper had ever revealed her association with Lloyd Freeman, but why should it be revealed? Lloyd's acting career had hardly been distinguished. No one had ever heard of him and certainly no one but Nicola Ross had ever connected him with Ivor.

Their relationship was all perfectly proper by 1990s standards, but there were mutterings. Some ancient Tories in the Lords turned up their old noses and clicked their old tongues. In Morningford the old soldier who was Ivor's agent told him it would be a good idea for him to get married.

“Before the election, you know, my boy. It would look well.”

My mother-in-law passed this on to Iris. I don't know how she got hold of it, but she knew James Maynard, the ex-colonel, very well, so perhaps he told her himself. Louisa Tesham was keen for Ivor to marry and if it had to be Juliet, it had to be. Much as she liked Juliet, she would have
preferred the Sloaney daughter of one of her Norfolk neighbors, someone whose grandparents Ivor's grandparents had known, but, she said, it wasn't up to her.

“It sounds like heresy,” she said, “but sometimes I think there is a great deal to be said for these arranged marriages that go on in some parts of the world. After all, we
are
wiser than your generation, you know, just as you'll be wiser than Nadine's.”

Ivor was beginning to see that remaining unmarried wasn't the wisest course he could take. He was well endowed with imagination and he could picture Juliet in a typical Tory's-wife wild silk dress and coat, her lovely face half shaded by a wide-brimmed hat, standing at his side while he presented awards or sitting two places from him on the top table at some Chamber of Commerce dinner. But he was no longer quite young. He knew quite a lot about life and he knew himself. Could he be content with one woman for the next, say, forty years?

If he married and a long career at the top of the political tree lay ahead of him, he would have to remain with that woman and be faithful to her. Or be secretly unfaithful to her in a way that would take a lot of energy and planning. “Deceit” was not a word he mentioned. The Pimlico flat would become a reality or else too dangerous to consider.

“Whenever I think about it,” he said, “I tell myself, you'll only fuck one woman for the rest of your life, and when I say that, Rob, I get cold feet. I get the shivers. I mean, Iris is my sister and I adore her, as you know, but I don't know how you manage.”

I smiled and then gave my noiseless laugh, but said nothing.

H
e has put away all her photographs except one. This is the one where she's windblown and laughing with Justin on the beach, which the newspapers used. The rest have disappeared. Once he'd gone to work I found them in Hebe's dressing table, in the drawer below the one where she'd kept the picture of Ivor Tesham and where I put her engagement ring, the gold bangle, the locket, and, of course, the pearls. They are all still in their frames.

It's a sign that he is getting over her. At last. He's taken his time about it. Alone with me in this room in the evenings, he no longer talks about her. To my relief, I don't think I shall ever hear that misplaced praise again. He has begun going out in the evenings, and not exclusively to fund-raising functions, for he has left the job he took soon after Hebe's death, or “moved on,” as he puts it, and is now the chief executive, no less, of a charity dedicated to improving the lot of people suffering from something called Marfan syndrome. He's getting a lot more money, I'm sure, and why he doesn't move us
all out of this dump to somewhere a bit more “leafy” and upmarket I don't know.