The Birthday Present (23 page)

He goes out alone, he says, maybe to the cinema, maybe to eat, but I think he takes one of the girls, Grania or Winsome Wendy. Lucy (surprise, surprise) has got married. Who would marry her I can't imagine, but you only have to look at some of the married women going shopping round here not to ask that question ever again. Once I would have been jealous of Gerry going out with women, but now I don't care at all. I was set on falling in love with him when I first came here but he killed my love, there's no doubt about that. He killed it with his coldness, his obsession with Hebe, and the way he took me for granted. Now he has started saying he will never marry again—well, he has said it once or twice— and I am glad of that, because although this job isn't what I had in mind when I first went to university, it's
a
job and with what he pays me and the quite high rent I get from Pandora, I don't do badly. I'm saving up for a new car. I don't want second-hand this time.

I rather like all these evenings on my own. I can relax, which I can't do nearly as well when he is there commenting on TV programs and changing channels without asking me. Last night I saw Ivor Tesham in a program called
The Question of the Hour
along with Nicola Ross (whom I once saw crying real tears on the stage), a Labour MP, Lib Dem peer, and a film director. He was quite good, full of confidence, not a bit put out by the Labour man attacking him over schools and the poll tax and unemployment. Justin came down in the middle of it, which is something I don't encourage. He wanted his father. I don't know why, but he has just started school and is being difficult.

“Daddy goes out quite a lot in the evenings now,” I said. “He can't stay in with you all the time. You'll have to get used to it.”

I admit this wasn't doing Gerry any favors, but I resent the fact that after all I have done for him and after all Gerry
hasn't
done, Justin is still obsessed with his father and doesn't treat me as his new mother, as I hoped would happen. I don't know why not and going to this primary school hasn't improved matters. He cries when he gets there and cries when he sees me waiting for him at the school gates, but I can't tell him that's not logical behavior, because he doesn't understand. He doesn't even
try
to understand.

I took him back to bed, telling him it was no good sitting up for Gerry as he wouldn't be home for hours. He wasn't. In fact, I had gone to bed, though I was still awake, lying there in the dark. When I checked the time I saw it was after two. Where can you go in West Hendon till two o'clock in the morning? It beats me. When I used to tell him I was out with Callum I could never think of a place we might have been.

Ivor Tesham has moved house. There was nothing about this in the papers—of course there wasn't, it's hardly news—but I saw about it in one of those color supplements, the property section. It's a beautiful house, somewhere in Westminster, the kind of place only the very rich can afford, and it makes me wonder where he gets his money from. His father died a few months ago, I saw the death notice, and a bit about him leaving a son and a daughter, Ivor and Iris, so I expect Ivor got the lion's share of the money. In the magazine photograph he's standing in front of the house on the steps leading up to the front door and Carmen is with him in a black suit that's a wee bit too tight for her and on her feet she's got what Hebe once told me were called “fuck me” shoes. That's the sort of thing he'd like. It's all of a piece with the mask and the dog collar and the sex toys.

The picture I cut out and gummed into the scrapbook. I
wonder why I keep it and why I keep on adding to it. I suppose I think it will come in useful one day. Mummy once said to me that keeping a scrapbook is a sign of mental disturbance in an adult.

A
LL THE TIME
I've been in Irving Road I haven't had a holiday. I could have—I will say for Gerry that he's not a slave driver—but I didn't know where to go, let alone who to go
with.
When I worked at the library I had a few people who could just about be called friends and one of them would probably have come with me, but once I left they drifted away. The truth is that none of them bothered to keep up with me. No doubt they have found more amusing company. Well, if it isn't a holiday, the time has come when I have had to take two weeks off. Mummy is ill—well, not really ill. She's had a hysterectomy and she had to have someone with her when she came out of hospital. Gerry didn't make a murmur. He said that now Justin was at school the two of them would be fine. One of the girls, Grania or Wendy, would be happy to come in. He is such an ungracious man, he seemed glad to see the back of me.

I got to my mother's house a day ahead of her discharge and I must say I quite enjoyed my day and night alone there. It was quite different without her, quiet and restful. While she was always bustling about and handing out gratuitous advice, I had never much liked the place, but appreciating my solitude in the kind of attractive surroundings I am not used to, I started thinking how happy I could be there if she never came home. If it was mine, if I had inherited it. But of course she did come home. I fetched her next morning.

She made the most appalling fuss about herself. A very nice and highly efficient nurse had assured me she wouldn't
be in any pain, just very tired. I mustn't let her lift anything heavy. Well, there was no problem with that. Mummy didn't try to lift anything, barely even a teacup. She sat down all day with her feet up and complained that she had backache and a headache and said she felt as if all her insides had been scooped out, her words, not mine. All my pleasure in being in that house was destroyed and I actually began to look forward to the return to Irving Road.

I had left Gerry her phone number but he didn't call, not once. I was determined not to bicker with Mummy and I kept to that, just smiling and saying nothing when she began saying pro vocative things, but after I'd been there ten days, exercising an iron control, I could stand it no longer, I shouted back and we had a terrible row.

It started with her asking about my job and she prefaced that by saying she hadn't mentioned it before, she thought it would be more tactful to wait a few days, but she couldn't restrain herself any longer. She was worried about me. If I really wanted to be a nanny, wouldn't it be best to do a proper training course? There was something called a Norland nanny. Did that mean you went to a place called Norland? If they charged she would pay. I was furious. Wasn't I old enough to make my own decisions in life? If she wanted to spend money on me she could give me a lump sum out of what my father had left.

“After three years at a good university,” she said, “you shouldn't be in a position to have to ask for money from an elderly woman who has barely enough to live on.”

I can't stand that kind of irrational argument. She had barely enough to live on but she had got eighty thousand pounds for that flat in Spain and said she could afford to pay nanny-training fees for me. I reminded her that I had given up my holiday to come and look after her. She said she
hadn't asked me, only told me about her hysterectomy; her friend next door would have been happy to come in twice a day. This developed into a slanging match; she was totally unreasonable, and it ended with my saying I was leaving. I had been there ten days anyway. Doing my best to behave in a civilized manner, I went next door and told the neighbor (an enormously fat woman with a perpetual grin) that I was going next day and would she be kind enough to look in and attend to Mummy's wants.

N
O ONE WAS
there to answer the phone when I called Gerry. I left a message to say I would be back next morning. At four in the afternoon the house was empty. One of the girls or Gerry's mother would have fetched Justin from school. Or so I thought. It was half past seven when they came home, long past Justin's bedtime, or what his bedtime would be if I had any say in the matter. I had shopped on the way home, which was just as well, as there was almost no food in the place, so I was able to manage a meal for both of them.

Before they came I had been all over the house, fearing I would find a mess, Gerry being hopeless at housework and even at basic tidying up. But everywhere was quite neat and clean. Bathrooms are always a giveaway but our sink had been wiped over after the last person washed his hands in it and the bath had been rinsed. The towels didn't look too dirty, the way they were when I first came and Grania (or Lucy or Wendy) had been in charge. I went into Gerry's bedroom and was very surprised to see the bed had been made. Men seldom make beds. They don't see the point, unless some woman is there to nag them into it.

I opened the drawer where Hebe's remaining jewelry
was. I was almost sure that when I last looked in there—I often did so to check on the pearls—the locket, engagement ring, and bangle had been in their silver-colored cardboard box on top and the old perfume box with the pearls in it underneath. “Almost.” I couldn't be absolutely sure and what if it was? Gerry had been giving that stuff the onceover. It was his, he had that right. Maybe he'd sat up here in the evenings, mooning over the woman who had worn it.

His clothes seemed more tidily arranged than they used to be. But that was nearly three years ago and he might have pulled himself together. My room was just as I had left it, neat and tidy, of course, though covered in dust. Well, I don't expect miracles and for Gerry to have dusted the place would have been a miracle. Justin's was the last room I went into. I was beginning to doubt that sensation I had had on coming into the house that someone else, and not one of the girls, had been in there in my absence. I had to rethink that once again. Justin's room was as neat as when I left it. I always made him tidy up everything before he went to bed, but he made a tremendous fuss about it and time after time Gerry countermanded my orders and told him he could leave it. Neither of them had done this, I was sure of it. And Justin had a new toy. It was a model of a farm with cows and sheep and pigs, a couple of carthorses, about a hundred chickens, a duck pond, and a haystack. A farm, I may add, the like of which no one had seen for half a century. The farmer with his pitchfork and his wife with her milking pail looked like an Amish couple. Still, I suppose he liked it. Someone, probably his grandmother or one of the girls, must have given it to him—no, someone who didn't know him very well if they thought they were consoling him for my absence.

Though the relative positions of the silver box and the
pearls box made me speculate a bit, I wasn't much troubled. I had wished for a minute or two that I had laid a hair on top of the pearls box as then I'd have been able to be sure it had been moved. But I hadn't and it hardly seemed to matter. I made pasta for our supper, with salad and some good whole-grain bread. Justin turned his nose up at this last, as he always does, and said he liked white sliced bread like they had had somewhere or other. I thought they must have been eating out quite a lot and that was all I did think then.

Gerry was very nice to me, nicer than he'd been for months, years probably. He asked about Mummy and said I must take time off whenever I liked to go and see her. Stay over a couple of nights if necessary. I said it was only in Ongar, no more than twenty-five miles away. I can't say either of them seemed to have missed me. We settled down to our usual evening television viewing, though I insisted on Justin going to bed first as it was already nearly half past eight. Gerry's niceness went on and on. He actually asked me if I had a preference as to which program we watched.

I dusted my room before going to bed and shook the duster out of the window like Mummy used to do when I was little.

T
HIS NEXT BIT
I am writing two days later. I am doing it because I don't know what else to do, because I am still in a state of shock. It's Saturday and Gerry took Justin out to buy him a pair of shoes. Their feet grow so fast at his age that they go through three pairs a year. They would have their tea out somewhere, he said, and wouldn't be back till late.

“Not after seven, I hope,” I said. “He was late last night and he shouldn't get into bad habits.”

It wasn't a nice day. Intermittent rain had been falling
since midday. I decided not to go out, though really I should have gone to the library as I'd nothing to read. Instead I looked through Gerry's meager collection of books, two shelves of them, that's all. Hebe, of course, read at most a couple of trashy novels a year and Gerry devotes all his time to the television, an absurd amount of time for an educated man. However, I found Charlotte Brontë's
Villette—
an O-level set book for one of them, I imagine—which I soon discovered was a depressing book if ever there was one. I am under no illusions about my condition and position in this world and I couldn't help seeing the parallels in
Villette
and my own case. The heroine might have been modeled on me if I had been alive at the time. Lucy Snowe,
c'est moi.
But Brontë makes the woman's neglect and loneliness a bit strong even for me, so I gave up and tidied the kitchen cupboards instead.

They came in at twenty to eight and they weren't alone. Pandora was with them and Justin was holding her hand. That was the first time I had seen her since she brought my TV set but I didn't guess, I suspected nothing, though there was no sign of the new shoes. She took off her jacket, looked in the mirror in the hallway, smiled radiantly at me. I thought they had met her by chance somewhere and she had come back with them to talk about the flat, about something being wrong with the flat. Better talk about it face-to-face than on the phone. I nearly asked her.

“I'll have to get Justin straight to bed,” I said.

“Not for a moment, Jane,” Gerry said. In an unexpected departure from the norm he had poured glasses of wine, which he was handing to us.

I sat down. “Apart from our parents, Jane, we want you to be the first to congratulate us. Pandora and I are engaged. We're going to get married in November.”

A
fter Gerry made that announcement I struck out with my right hand—I don't know why, perhaps to push him away—and I knocked over the glass of wine. The glass broke and the wine went everywhere. I shut my eyes, turned away, and ran to the stairs, ran up the stairs. In my room I threw myself down on the bed, hearing his words like a hammer beating against the inside of my head.